By Aanya Sharma
During America’s COVID-19 crisis there persists an unshakable sense of anxiety, uncertainty, and fear. With physical health presently at the forefront of nationwide concern, some UC Santa Barbara researchers and instructors are making sure that mental health is addressed at the same time.
Jesse Miller, postdoctoral fellow of English and Medical Humanities at UC Santa Barbara. Photo by Megan Mette.
One is Jesse Miller, a postdoctoral fellow of English and medical humanities at UCSB, who is teaching an English course this spring called US Cultures of Mental Illness. Miller teaches with an emphasis on cultural approaches to health, illness, and disability, as well as 20th and 21st century American literature and modernism.
In a recent interview, Miller discussed his goals in designing an English course centered on mental illness and its relevance in the current social climate that has resulted from the pandemic.
Q: As an instructor, what are your objectives for this course?
A: My experience with mental illness through multiple generations of my own family has made me acutely aware of the impact that mental anguish can have on people, and the often-limited means that are available to talk about and treat that anguish. I have been fascinated with the way that mental illness often leads artists to challenge literary conventions and experiment with modes of representation.
The goal of this course is to think about mental illness from a sociocultural perspective by exploring the representation of mental illness in modern American literature. A sociocultural approach to mental illness insists that understanding and adequately responding to mental illness requires taking into account changing meanings of extreme psychological distress over history and across cultures. Culture influences what thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are considered normal and abnormal. And it shapes the kinds of stresses people experience, the way they respond to those stresses, how they and those around them interpret psychological anguish and abnormal behavior that results from those stresses, the language they use to describe that experience, and the treatment they are likely to receive.
Q: Have you adapted the course in any way to reflect current events?
A: I ask my students to begin each class by spending ten minutes freewriting, that is, writing whatever comes to your head without stopping. Freewriting has been shown to have positive effects on one's mental health. It's a chance to document things that have happened, to reflect on one's feelings, or simply a way of taking time to play and be creative with no overriding end goal.
Later in the quarter, we'll be building off of this by creating a class Zine which will include creative works, personal essays, and interviews by the members of the class. The idea is to move from reading about mental illness in culture, to creating our own culture of mental health and illness in response to our current conditions.
Q: Can you say anything about the relevance of your course today, with mental health often a major concern of those suddenly “trapped” at home.
A: I designed the syllabus before coronavirus had really hit the news. But the first couple of stories I had scheduled for us to read, "The Yellow Wallpaper" [by Charlotte Perkins Gilman] and "The Fall of the House of Usher" [by Edgar Allan Poe], are uncannily relevant right now. Both stories are about characters who are trapped inside and end up going mad. And they have provided opportunities for us in the class to reflect on the way that mental illness is not just something that is inside someone's head but is intimately shaped by our physical and cultural environment.
Works like these really help put the coronavirus pandemic and its effects on mental health into perspective. The pandemic has put a strain on people's mental health while exacerbating some of the social inequities that already existed in our culture. Physical distancing and anxiety over getting sick or having loved ones get sick, of course play a role. But, so do stresses due to loss of jobs and income, dangerous work conditions, or lack of access to adequate mental health services due to the contingencies of health insurance and immigration status.
In this context, I think literature can be a real comfort, a pleasurable escape. But even more importantly, it can offer us useful perspectives for thinking about and responding to a moment like this one.
Aanya Sharma is a Junior at UC Santa Barbara, pursuing a degree in Communication. She wrote this article for her Writing Program course Journalism for Web and Social Media.