Narrating Mental Illness: Cultural Psychiatry, Narrative Form, and the Representation of Psychological Suffering in Victorian, Modernist, and Contemporary English Literature

Abstract

The paper reviews how mental illness and psychological suffering are represented in Victorian literature, Modernist literature, and modern English literature using both the cultural psychiatry and narrative theory. The context of the research is the current interdisciplinary trend in medical humanities of highlighting that mental illness is not a biomedical state but a culturally and narrative phenomenon. The main aim of the study is to examine the importance of narrative structure and culture in the representation of mental illness in literature in different eras of history. The paradigm of the research is interpretivist and a qualitative textual analysis approach is adopted. The theoretical background is a combination of cultural psychiatry (Arthur Kleinman), narrative theory (Genette; Ricoeur), cognitive narratology (Palmer), and some discourse analysis by Foucauld. Primary literature data are drawn out of purposely chosen primary literary works that define the Victorian, Modernist, and contemporary events, whereas the secondary data comprise peer-reviewed academic literature. The selection of texts, which directly address the topic of mental illness and psychological distress, is performed with the help of a purposive sampling method. The results indicate that there is a diachronic change in narrative strategies: Victorian literature distances mental illness to the moral and institutional condition, Modernist literature internalizes mental anguish to the experimental narrative practices, and the current literature foreshadows narrative agency, trauma, and ethical care. The paper concludes that narrative form is a cultural-psychiatric process that defines mental illness. It suggests that interdisciplinary studies with the inclusion of non-Western literary tradition and reader-response viewpoints should be extended in order to broaden the cultural range of mental health narratives.