Introduction: Mental Health and Illness in American Culture

Abstract

Guest editing a special in a prestigious journal such as this one is a daunting task, not only from an intellectual/scholarly perspective, but from a moral one. A special offers the promise of unique, varied and cutting edge insights on a particular topic of interest and relevance to its readers. It promises, or at least should, that its contents are authoritative and represent a fair representation of scholarship and critical thought on that topic. As such, a guest editor implicitly promises that no stone has been left unturned in bringing the issue to meaningful, but more importantly useful, fruition.That was certainly my intent when I first proposed the idea for this issue to Kathy Merlock Jackson, its editor. Truth be told, I was at the time at the tail end of a publishing marathon spawned by an axiom shared by my colleague Tom Ryan of the Loyola Institute for Ministry that dictated, No thought shall go unpublished. On the heels of writing for publications as varied as the Journal of Popular Culture (Popular Culture Association), Ethics and Behavior (American Psychological Association) and the Journal of Creativity in Counseling (American Counseling Association), as well as founding the division of Mental Health, Mental Illness and Popular Culture for the Popular Culture Association, I believed that there was still more to say although I wasn't quite sure of what that was. As you will read in this issue, there most definitely was.Now, two years later, at the threshold of an issue of The Journal of American Culture comes the culmination of not only that effort, but the efforts of many; and not only of those whose fine work appears in the following pages, but also the thoughts and insights of those whose do not. For it was those scholars who helped focus my thinking and clarify my selection criteria for this issue. Those authors, some from the social sciences and others from the humanities, helped me to better understand the relationship between mental health, mental illness and the broader culture. At the cost of sounding like someone accepting an award who feels compelled to thank those who did not win, I am indeed thankful and grateful to potential contributors on topics that included the history of the disabilities movement, the reflection of the tortured psyche through the lenses of cultural icons Hitchcock and Huston, Freud's role in shaping thought on mental illness and treatment, the political dynamics of the LGBT movement, the socio-psychiatric dynamics of race and the way mental illness has co-evolved with American society and culture.By the time these words are published, a notso-quiet revolution will have been well underway in the mental health field, heralded by the release in May of last year of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-Fifth Edition (DSM-5) by the American Psychiatric Association (2013). Long awaited since its immediate predecessor, the DSM IV-TR (text revision) in 2000, and a state-of-the-science compendium of mental disorders dating back to the publication of the Statistical Manual for the Use of Institutions for the Insane by the American Psycho-Medical Association (AMPA 1918), the DSM-5 promised a level of diagnostic clarity, clinical utility and cultural sensitivity not even dreamed of in the early nineteenth century when mental disorders were first classified.While this (re)evolution may sound to those outside of the social and medical sciences like little more than an update to a professional publication, it is actually far more. The newest iteration of the DSM represents an attempt to mend the seemingly ageless rift between mind and body that dates to Aristotle and Plato, wends its way through the centuries to Descartes, and leads to the doorstep of Modernity. With its newest publication, the American Psychiatric Association has attempted to connect with its presumptive stakeholders-the (wo)man on the streets who has been, is, or will be the recipient of a psychiatric diagnosis and consequent mental health treatment. …