TOPICS IN MENTAL HEALTH

Credit Hours: 3 · Undergraduate Upper-Level

Since the arrival of Covid, we have seen a proliferation of novel therapeutic practices like mental telehealth, as people around the globe cope with unprecedented isolation and require the ability to communicate, confess, and introspect with a professional, a stranger. This course will investigate several things. First: what is the history of psychotherapy both in the US and globally? How, in other words, did we get here? And second: how have literature, film, and now social media represented this changing history back to us? Have our understandings of conditions like depression, schizophrenia, anxiety, and psychosis come to be thought—and even lived—as, themselves, essentially cinematic and literary experiences? Has social media now assumed some of this responsibility of narration and explanation? And if so, to what end? This course will examine the works of authors such as Poe, Plath, Lynch, and Moshfegh. Repeatable for Credit.