love is stored in the kitchen

A short comic I made about my experiences as a seasonal worker, and the way places change you.

(feel free to ignore this I know this is asking for a lot also)

so let me preface this by saying that although this topic overlaps with my academic work, it's not my specific area of expertise, and this list is really just one random person's suggestions for some places to start looking. these category groupings are loose and sort of chaotic. i also am not uncritically endorsing anything on this list. for example: it includes the right-wing libertarian thomas szasz, on the grounds that his work still shows up in footnotes today, and i think if you want to learn about antipsych stuff you need to be aware of him and what he said. but my point is that this is not, like, a list of 100% correct opinions you should adopt; it's a collection of lots of different approaches and ideas, and you should always read critically.

also, i skewed heavily toward books rather than articles, and i didn't include clinical trials, papers, etc that many of these texts cite, because that list would be, like, the length of my dissertation bibliography and i was trying to lean more toward things that make an analytical/historical argument. but i do definitely encourage tracking down some of the papers etc that these books reference, and reading through them for yourself.

libgen and z lib are always my first go-tos for books, but there are certainly other options if those don't have something. i may also be able to procure you some pdfs if you message me. :)

general/introductory

The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry by Gary Greenberg

Manufacturing Depression: The Secret History of a Modern Disease by Gary Greenberg

Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill by Robert Whitaker

Psychiatric Hegemony: A Marxist Theory of Mental Illness by Bruce Cohen

Creating Mental Illness by Alan V. Horwitz

Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity, from the Bible to Freud, from the Madhouse to Modern Medicine by Andrew Scull

Psychiatry and its Discontents by Andrew Scull

The Rise and Fall of the Biopsychosocial Model: Reconciling Art and Science in Psychiatry by S. Nassir Ghaemi

Madness: A Brief History by Roy Porter

Mind Fixers: Psychiatry's Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness (Anne Harrington)

older/foundational texts

On Our Own: Patient-Controlled Alternatives to the Mental Health System by Judi Chamberlin

Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates by Erving Goffman

Psycho Politics by Peter Sedgwick

The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness by R.D. Laing

The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct by Thomas Szasz

on drugs (esp antidepressants)

Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America by Robert Whitaker

The Emperor's New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth by Irving Kirsch

The Antidepressant Era by David Healy

The Myth of the Chemical Cure: A Critique of Psychiatric Drug Treatment by Joanna Moncrieff

Pillaged: Psychiatric Medications and Suicide Risk by Ronald Maris

history and histories

Inheriting Madness: Professionalization and Psychiatric Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century France by Ian Dowbiggin

Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848–1918 by Daniel Pick

Knowledge and Power: Perspectives in the History of Psychiatry, ed. by Eric J. Engstrom, Matthias M. Weber, & Paul Hoff

Discovering the History of Psychiatry, ed. by Roy Porter

Institutionalizing Gender: Madness, the Family, and Psychiatric Power in Nineteenth-Century France by Jessie Hewitt

The Invention of Madness: State, Society, and the Insane in Modern China by Emily Baum

What's Wrong With the Poor? Psychiatry, Race, and the War on Poverty by Mical Raz

A Critical History of Schizophrenia by Kieran McNally

Mental Health in the War on Terror: Culture, Science, and Statecraft by Neil Krishan Aggarwal

Hyperactive: The Controversial History of ADHD by Matthew Smith

Mania: A Short History of Bipolar Disorder by David Healy

academic journals that publish relevant things (some open-access content here; otherwise you may need to get creative. lmk if you have no idea how to do that)

Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences

Bulletin of the History of Medicine

Journal of the History of Psychology

Journal of the History of Psychiatry

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences

Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences

a few more 'theory'-oriented texts

Anti-Oedipus/A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari

Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason by Michel Foucault

Psychopolitics by Byung-Chul Han

The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han

misc stuff i personally think is cool and somewhat relevant

New Yorker, "The DSM and the Nature of Disease"

New Yorker, "Does Psychiatry Need Science?"

New Yorker, "The Dictionary of Disorder"

Everybody by Olivia Laing

Pathology and the Postmodern: Mental Illness as Discourse and Experience, ed. by Dwight Fee

"The Functions of the Brain: Gall to Ferrier (1808–1886)" by Robert Young

"Neuroses of the Stomach: Eating, Gender, and Psychopathology in French Medicine, 1800–1870" by Elizabeth Williams

Model Behavior: Animal Experiments, Complexity, and the Genetics of Psychiatric Disorders by Nicole C. Nelson

From Hysteria to Hormones: A Rhetorical History by Amy Koerber

Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality, ed. by Jonathan Metzl and Anna Rutherford

misc resources

Factsheet on the 'chemical imbalance' myth

IsisCB (bibliography for history of science; searchable by topic, author, journal, and more)

Mad In America (webzine founded by Robert Whitaker; content varies widely by contributor so read critically as always)

Hearing Voices Network (support and community for those who hear voices)

So anyone who has even glanced at my blog knows that a lot of my work is built around an area of literary theory called ‘monster theory’, which is far from a major theoretical discipline. As such I thought I’d give a little run down on what it is and resources that are good in terms of getting started.

Monster Theory is loosely described as the study of monsters, fictional characters that we (humans) deem monstrous. This is usually rooted in the concept of norm/other, which becomes human/monster. The basis of modern monster theory is built on the work of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, who published a paper in 1996 titled Monster Culture (Seven Theses) which included seven different and overlapping views on what monsters are, why we create them, what they mean and how they fit into both literary canon and our society. These seven theses are (very quickly and loosely);

The Monster’s Body Is A Cultural Body: a monstrous being “is born only at [a] metaphoric crossroads, as an embodiment of a certain cultural moment.” Meaning a monster created for a work of fiction is generally an embodiment of a certain cultural anxiety or fear occurring in a specific socio-cultural moment. For instance, during the 70s and 80s, during the AIDS crisis in the US, you’ll notice a sharp rise in the number of vampire films (creatures who transmit a kind of ‘death’ through bodily fluids, through a highly sexualised penetrative contact).

The Monster Always Escapes: a monstrous being is, in part, so threatening because it is pervasive. The monster might appear dead, only for the corpse to be missing in the final shots of the film. This builds upon the previous point; a cultural anxiety does not immediately vanish simply because the personified monster of it is slain, issues like disease, poverty, homophobia, racism, ableism will ultimately again rear their ugly heads.

The Monster Is The Harbinger of Category Crisis: monstrous beings refuse “to participate in the classificatory ‘order of things’,” and resist any kind of systematic structure. In a culture so obsessed with binary oppositions and classifications, things that refuse classification are often a threat to that very system of classification. If the system is not all-encompassing, it fails altogether. This can cause monsters to shake established systems of understanding culture, identity and knowledge. 

The Monster Dwells At The Gates of Difference: “…the monster is difference made flesh […] monstrous difference tends to be cultural, political, racial, economic, sexual.” Monstrous beings are, as previously mentioned, a cultural body, which also means generally they take on traits of ostracised members of a culture, and act as stand in’s for fears, phobias and ostracisation of these social groups. For example, in a later work by Cohen, Undead: A Zombie Oriented Ontology, he states of zombies; “…we feel no shame in declaring their bodies repulsive. They eat disgusting food. They possess no coherent language; it all sounds like grunts and moans. They desire everything we possess.” And further notes that the generally accepted method of dispatching them is a gunshot to the head–a war crime against another human being. This same rhetoric could easily be applied to conservative white opinions of immigrants–and in fact, the origin of the word zombie can be traced back to the Haitian slave trade route.

The Monster Polices The Borders Of The Possible: to live in the dynamic the monster is predicated upon (norm/other, human/monster), there must, therefore, be a border between the two. The monster can therefore serve as a warning; transgress the boundaries by which you are human, and become monstrous; “…the monster prevents mobility (intellectual, geographical, sexual).” The most popular examples of this theory comes in the form of a Disney film: Beauty and the Beast. The Prince does not extend hospitalities to the old woman seeking aid, acting outside an accepted code of conduct for their society, and is therefore rendered monstrous as a result. While this is a more direct example, the trope is pervasive even among works and genres not featuring the supernatural.

The Monster Is Really A Kind Of Desire: the monstrous is often associated with a kind of transgressive or forbidden action, like say…the fact that female villains will often take on intense temptress roles, this is usually in an attempt to enforce and normalise the opposite behaviour. “The same creatures who terrify and interdict can also evoke potent escapist fantasies; the linking of monstrosity with the forbidden makes the monster all the more appealing as a temporary egress from constraint.”

The Monster Stands At The Threshold…Of Becoming: This thesis is really only a paragraph and is possibly my favourite piece of writing ever so rather than try and explain it I’ll simply let it stand on it’s own: Monsters are our children. They can be pushed to the farthest margins of geography and discourse, hidden away at the edges of the world and in the forbidden recesses of our mind, but they always return. And when they come back, they bring not just a fuller knowledge of our place in history and the history of knowing our place, but they bear self-knowledge, human knowledge–and a discourse all the more sacred as it arises from the Outside. These monsters ask us how we perceive the world, and how we have misrepresented what we have attempted to place. They ask us to reevaluate our cultural assumptions about race, gender, sexuality, our perception of difference, our tolerance towards its expression. They ask us why we have created them.

In Jerusalem, and I mean within the ancient walls, I walk from one epoch to another without a memory to guide me. The prophets over there are sharing the history of the holy…ascending to heaven and returning less discouraged and melancholy, because love and peace are holy and are coming to town. I was walking down a slope and thinking to myself: How do the narrators disagree over what light said about a stone? Is it from a dimly lit stone that wars flare up? I walk in my sleep. I stare in my sleep. I see no one behind me. I see no one ahead of me. All this light is for me. I walk. I become lighter. I fly then I become another. Transfigured. Words sprout like grass from Isaiah’s messenger mouth: “If you don’t believe you won’t be safe.” I walk as if I were another. And my wound a white biblical rose. And my hands like two doves on the cross hovering and carrying the earth. I don’t walk, I fly, I become another, transfigured. No place and no time. So who am I? I am no I in ascension’s presence. But I think to myself: Alone, the prophet Muhammad spoke classical Arabic. “And then what?” Then what? A woman soldier shouted: Is that you again? Didn’t I kill you? I said: You killed me…and I forgot, like you, to die.