Mental Illness and Its Discontents

Catalog description

What does it mean to be mentally ill, and who gets to decide? This course will offer a critical and interdisciplinary introduction to abnormal psychology, centering the ethics, narratives, and power structures that shape how psychological suffering is classified and treated. We will explore how dominant clinical frameworks define and address mental distress and ask what those frameworks may overlook, dehumanize, or distort. Students will explore key diagnostic categories such as depression, anxiety, trauma-related disorders, psychosis, and personality disorders while considering their cultural and historical roots. In addition to clinical science, we will draw from memoirs, journalism, media, and critical theory to explore how experiences of distress are shaped by race, class, gender, disability, and sociocultural context. Questions we will consider include: How have diagnostic categories changed over time and why? What ethical dilemmas arise in labeling and treating suffering? How do emerging treatments challenge or reinforce dominant ideas of health and healing? And what happens when existential, relational, or collective pain is reframed as individual disorder? Students will be encouraged to examine how public narratives of mental illness intersect with course themes. Projects in small-group conferences might include a media analysis of how a mental-health condition is portrayed and moralized; a critical review of a podcast related to mental health care in the United States; a literature review of a new diagnostic construct or treatment; or an ethics case study exploring dilemmas in diagnosis, care, or access. Care and the Good Life: Exploring End-of-Life Caregiving and Death