Perceptions of Mental Illness

This interdisciplinary course centers on the need to understand mental illness in a broad social context. It covers personal experience of mental illness, history of psychiatric concepts and treatment, politics of diagnosis, mental health policy and deinstitutionalization, public attitudes toward mental illness, social factors and epidemiology of mental illness, and links between mental illness and creativity. There is much attention to artistic perceptions of mental illness through fiction, memoirs, drama, music, and art.