Shifting Moods and Shifting Discourses: Hopelessness at the Intersection of American Catholicism and Psychology

Abstract

ABSTRACT: In his 1971 book, Out of the Depths , William Collins, CSS, recounts his long struggle with anxiety and depression. For Collins, as for other American Catholics in the twentieth century, the experience of hopelessness was influenced by religious and medical discourses that shifted in relation to each other over time. Early in the century Catholic ideas of hope were expressed in the precise categories of neo-Scholasticism. By the end of the century there were multiple Catholic approaches to hope. The same time period saw the integration of psychiatry and psychology into mainstream American culture. As these disciplines were defining themselves and striving for recognition from the scientific and medical establishments, the categories used for mental illness were also changing. From nervous problems and neurasthenia early in the century to schizophrenia, anxiety, and then depression, the vocabulary of emotional and mental problems changed as ideas about their nature and causes developed. Collins's narrative of alternating hopelessness and hope gives insight into how his experience was shaped by his suffering, the social expectations he had internalized, and the institutional frameworks he was navigating. It also gives broader insight into how American Catholics viewed emotional problems in the middle of the twentieth century.