„Nie daję łajbie żadnych szans”. Depresja: choroba czy rozczarowanie?

Abstract

The subject of depression, often driven by personal experience, has lately become very prominent in the public sphere. Olga Hund's Psy ras drobnych [Dogs of Smaller Breeds] (2018) is a novel about depression, though unlike many European films and novels, it does not blame the condition on the individual – the main character of the story. Her book is memoir of sorts, a series of dramatic scenes from a mental ward of the Kobierzyn Psychiatric Hospital in Cracow. The whole is written, we may assume, to provoke out-rage: it is an accusation of the health care system, yet the blame for the mental condition rather than the wrong therapy, is put squarely on the structures and socio-economic mechanisms of the neoliberal society. The book makes two points. First, the psychiatric hospital by its very nature is a total institution that’s totally indispensable; and second – as seen from the interface of the ‘normal’ people and the mental patients – the social, economic and ideological factors have a significant role in generating suffering and the mental illness itself.