Mental Disorders Portrayed in Literature

Summary

Literature by and about people who are mentally ill aids understanding of the mind and society. This is one reason literature has always presented mental disorders. Moreover, some think that mental illness and the genius that produces art are related; although this contention is debated, many great artists have experienced mental illness. Even inexperienced writers often produce powerful first-person accounts of mental disorders. Studying historical literature about mental disorders aids in understanding not only universals of the psyche but also specific societies’ views of mental disorders.

History

In ancient Greek works, people are driven to madness by circumstances or the gods, but the inner processes of madness are unexamined. A true psychology began with later Greek philosophers. The biblical king Nebuchadnezzar, driven from his people, entered an animal-like state. Many of the cures by Jesus, seen as the casting out of demons, may have involved hysterical illnesses or mental disorders. In medieval Arthurian romances, Tristram and Lancelot experience breaks with reason, distress, and guilt.

Until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe, supernatural explanations for disordered behavior and thought predominated. Those with a disability or certain mental illnesses were sometimes seen as touched by God, while symptoms of other mental illnesses were interpreted as signs of demoniac activity. Most cultures also believed in natural explanations and medical cures, no matter how crude. Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) discusses causes of melancholy (depression) such as stale air and too little sunlight.

In the eighteenth century, religious fervor was sometimes defined as insanity. Before then, religious ecstasies or fears were considered either as genuine contact with God, as deceptive acts of the devil, as natural healthy actions, or as nonsupernatural illness. The fifteenth century autobiography of Margery Kempe alternates religious passion with self-doubt; many of her contemporaries considered her mentally ill. Thomas Hoccleve, also of the fifteenth century, was deeply aware of his own mental health issues, which he felt religion solved only temporarily. John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), though cast in supernatural terms, may seem to current readers to depict what was later termed bipolar disorder.

Artists and Mental Illness

Modern experts have perceived mental disorders in the lives of many of history's artists, whether or not the artist was diagnosed and treated at the time. English Romantic poet William Blake, known for his poetry’s elaborate personal mythology and for visions he claimed to literally see, has been described as someone who experienced schizophrenia. Some have identified bipolar disorder in the blisses and depressive depths that may be found in the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Either schizophrenic or affective (mood) disorders have been ascribed in the twentieth century to many artists, including writers August Strindberg , Charles Baudelaire, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Joseph Conrad, and Franz Kafka. Many of these writers wrote about mental problems, as in Coleridge’s depressed “Dejection, an Ode” or Kafka’s dreamlike and paranoid works. Researchers have argued that mental disorders are much more common among artists than among the general population.

Others say such conclusions are overstated and caution about drawing conclusions regarding authors’ lives from their work. Many artists, however, have recorded their own mental problems or time spent in asylums. The British poet Christopher Smart, after a fever, was in and out of institutions and saw himself as excessive in “mirth and melancholy.” William Cowper, another British poet of the eighteenth century, wrote about his difficult mood fluctuations. Nineteenth century British writer John Ruskin, whose grandfather experienced psychosis, experienced a breakdown in 1861 and major depression through 1862.

In the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf experienced a major breakdown in 1904, refusing to eat and hearing voices, which she recorded in fictitious form (attributed to a tropical fever) in The Voyage Out (1915). Woolf experienced depression all of her life and ultimately died by suicide. In the United States, a group of poets, called the confessional school, became famous for their experiences with mental disorders. Robert Lowell and members of his circle, including Theodore Roethke and John Berryman, all wrote poetry about the experience of mental illness.

Fiction and Mental Disorders

Literature is full of vivid images of mental disorders: the real melancholy and feigned madness of Hamlet; the delusions and obsessions of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605, 1615); Mrs. Rochester in Jane Eyre: An Autobiography (1847) by Charlotte Brontë; the obsessive, depressive, and neurasthenic qualities in Edgar Allan Poe’s fiction and poetry; and Boo Radley in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960).

William Faulkner, Jerzy Kosinski, and John Barth have presented a number of figures with mood, thought, or character disorders. Faulkner’s ability to present a disturbed inner life, as in The Sound and the Fury (1929), is impressive. Kosinski’s hard, objective descriptions in The Painted Bird (1965) and Steps (1968) are chilling. Barth’s The Floating Opera (1956) and Lost in the Funhouse (1968) mix humor and pathos. Peter Straub, also known for supernatural horror fiction, depicts real-life horrors such as sexual abuse, disassociation, and compulsive violence in fiction such as Koko (1988) and The Throat (1993).

Conrad Aiken’s “Silent Snow, Secret Snow” uses snow as a metaphor for the self-enclosed world of those experiencing schizophrenia. “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, shows a woman’s experience with postpartum psychosis, with strongly feminist implications; Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) and Sue Kaufman’s Diary of a Mad Housewife (1967) implicate the wife’s social role as a cause of mental problems. Issues of the political power behind who gets to define madness also arise in The Case History of Comrade V. (1972), by James Park Sloan, which is written in the form of various psychiatric reports, each calling the facts of the others into question.

Killers with mental disorders are common in fiction and film, with notable examples including Straub's works, Robert Bloch's 1959 novel Psycho, and Thomas Harris's books about Hannibal Lecter, the best known of which is The Silence of the Lambs (1981). However, advocates for greater societal acceptance of those experiencing mental illness have often criticized such portrayals as promoting a misconception that mentally ill individuals are often or always a danger to others.

Much fantasy and science fiction depicts certain delusions and fears as literal truths. Philip K. Dick’s science fiction depicts schizophrenic and paranoid realities. Time out of Joint (1959), The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), and Martian Time-Slip (1976) are three examples. Dick writes about a world run under a caste system based on psychoses in Clans of the Alphane Moon (1975). Anna Kavan in Ice (1967) and William S. Burroughs in such novels as Naked Lunch (1959) and The Soft Machine (1961) mix science fiction events or imagery with autobiographic elements of drug addiction and paranoia. Doris Lessing’s fantastic fiction, including The Golden Notebook (1962) and The Four-Gated City (1969), often questions what madness is, seeing it as possibly a part of important personal transformation.

Mark Haddon's award-winning The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003) is written from the point of view of an autistic teenager. The book was widely praised by critics and mental health experts for the sensitivity and nuance of its portrayal. Haddon's 2006 novel A Spot of Bother features a protagonist who is a hypochondriac and experiences severe panic attacks.

In the twenty-first century, young-adult novels dealing with mental illness have become more common. Many of these books focus on teenagers experiencing depression; examples include It's Kind of a Funny Story (2006) by Ned Vizzini, Thirteen Reasons Why (2007) by Jay Asher, and Will Grayson, Will Grayson (2010) by John Green and David Levithan. Narratives involving eating disorders also became common, such as in Wintergirls (2009) by Laurie Halse Anderson and Starved (2012) by Michael Somers.

Nonfiction and Fictionalized Accounts

Some of the best and best-known fiction about mental illness is based on real experiences. Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963) depicts depression, institutionalization, and suicide. Plath was also associated with the confessional school. Mary Ward’s The Snake Pit (1946) and Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) focus on life in a mental hospital. Ward and Kesey are highly critical of the mental health care system. I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (1964), by Hannah Green (actually Joanna Greenberg), and Lisa, Bright and Dark, by John Neufeld (1969), depict changes of thought and mood disorders. Robert Lindner’s The Fifty Minute Hour (1955) contains fictionalized case histories from the therapist’s viewpoint. Lisa and David (1961), by Theodore Isaac Rubin, and The Three Faces of Eve (1957), by Corbett H. Thigpen and Hervey M. Cleckley, are also fictionalized accounts by therapists. Chris Costner Sizemore wrote her own story in I’m Eve (1977).

In some of these, such as Kesey’s book, patients in a mental hospital are seen more as political prisoners than as ill people in need of help, but the pain and isolation of a mental disorder are always clear. The female voices often indicate a connection between mental disorders and the position of a woman in society—something Plath makes explicit in The Bell Jar and implicit in much of her poetry. Fictionalized and nonfiction accounts of mental problems show that disordered behavior, thought, perceptions, and moods can coexist with genuine insight into one’s own psyche and society.

Nonfiction first-person accounts of mental disorders often offer stunning insight into the experiences of those who live with mental illness. A good example is Operators and Things: The Inner Life of a Schizophrenic (1958), by Barbara O’Brien, with its elaborate visions of “hook operators” who control people, who are “things.” Also noteworthy is Mark Vonnegut’s The Eden Express (1975), concerning his experiences with schizophrenia. Often careful self-observation and extreme introspection highlight these works, as in John Custance’s Wisdom, Madness, and Folly (1952) and Adventure into the Unconscious (1954). Novelist William Styron’s Darkness Visible (1990) is a moving memoir of depression.

The 1980s and 1990s saw many accounts of mental illness. With growing social awareness of the trauma resulting from sexual abuse, many first-person accounts were published, including My Father’s House: A Memoir of Incest and Healing, by Sylvia Fraser (1987), and The Obsidian Mirror, by Louise M. Wisechild (1988). Dissociative identity disorder, which became a controversial diagnosis, also is depicted in many books. Such works include Sybil (1973), by Flora Rheta Schreiber, Daniel Keyes’s The Minds of Billy Milligan (1981), When Rabbit Howls, by Truddi Chase (1987), and Prism: Andrea’s World (1985), by Jonathan Bliss and Eugene Bliss. Other memoirs that delve into mental illness are Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen (1993) and Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs (2003). The Noonday Demon (2001), which chronicles author Andrew Solomon's experiences with depression, won the National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. The Man Who Couldn't Stop (2014), by journalist David Adam, was widely praised for its examination of obsessive-compulsive disorder, which interweaves the author's own experiences with the disorder with case studies of others who experience the illness and notes about the science and history surrounding the condition.

Bibliography

“The Bell Jar.” British Library, www.bl.uk/works/the-bell-jar. Accessed 28 Apr. 2023.

Claridge, Gordon, et al. Sounds from the Bell Jar: Ten Psychotic Authors. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. Studies of important writers who experienced mental illness.

Friedrich, Otto. Going Crazy: An Inquiry into Madness in Our Time. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976. A study of what madness is and how it is defined, with examples from case studies, literary works, and authors’ lives.

Glenn, Michael, ed. Voices from the Asylum. New York: Harper & Row, 1974. Concentrating on experiences within mental hospitals, this includes first-person accounts by staff and patients, poetry, and a short story by Poe.

Kaplan, Bert, ed. The Inner World of Mental Illness. New York: Harper & Row, 1964. An excellent selection of first-person accounts from published sources; some excerpts are brief or lack context, but are still effective and depict a wide range of illnesses.

Kaup, Monika. Mad Intertextuality: Madness in Twentieth-Century Women’s Writing. Trier, Germany: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 1993. Heavy on some literary terms, but useful study about cultural tendencies and lesser-known novels.

Peterson, Dale, ed. A Mad People’s History of Madness. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982. These first-person accounts go back to the fifteenth century. Excellent bibliography.

Porter, Roy. A Social History of Madness: The World Through the Eyes of the Insane. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987. A study of what madness is and how society defines it, including literary and first-person accounts.

Stanford, Gene, and Barbara Stanford, eds. Strangers to Themselves. New York: Bantam Books, 1973. First-person accounts, fiction about mental illness, and some clinical articles.