Below are recommendations for books relating to mental health. Please feel free to comment with any recommendations of your own to add to this list!
Mad at School
Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life
“Mad at School explores the contested boundaries between disability, illness, and mental illness in the setting of U.S. higher education. Much of the research and teaching within disability studies assumes a disabled body but a rational and energetic (an “agile”) mind. In Mad at School , scholar and disabilities activist Margaret Price asks: How might our education practices change if we understood disability to incorporate the disabled mind?Mental disability (more often called “mental illness”) is a topic of fast-growing interest in all spheres of American culture, including popular, governmental, aesthetic, and academic. Mad at School is a close study of the ways that mental disabilities impact academic culture. Investigating spaces including classrooms, faculty meeting rooms, and job searches, Price challenges her readers to reconsider long-held values of academic life, including productivity, participation, security, and independence. Ultimately, she argues that academic discourse both produces and is produced by a tacitly privileged “able mind,” and that U.S. higher education would benefit from practices that create a more accessible academic world.Mad at School is the first book to use a disability-studies perspective to focus on the ways that mental disabilities impact academic culture at institutions of higher education. Individual chapters examine the language used to denote mental disability; the role of “participation” and “presence” in student learning; the role of “collegiality” in faculty work; the controversy over “security” and free speech that has arisen in the wake of recent school shootings; and the marginalized status of independent scholars with mental disabilities.”
– https://www.press.umich.edu/script/press/1612837
Even If You Can’t See It: Invisible Disability and Neurodiversity
By: Sejal Shah
Our 2019 Mental Health Month Keynote Speaker, author Sejal Shah writes about coming to terms with living with a major mood disorder and the complex cultural, practical, and emotional ramifications of that experience while a graduate student and as an academic.
Shah, Sejal. “Even If you Can’t see It: Invisible Disability and Neurodiversity”. Kenyon Review Online, (2019).
Admission: Madness and (Be)coming Out Within and Through Spaces of Confinement
Abstract:
This article examines, through a performative narrative, an installation artwork that I created in May 2008 titled Admission. This artwork and reflective writing embodies a form of creative inquiry into issues surrounding and the intersections of (be)coming out, nonvisible disabilities, and representations of mental illness. Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of becoming and the rhizome inform my investigation into (be)coming out, not as an event thought of as a singular moment defined through a fixed notion of the subject, but as an ongoing process of creating connections between subjects understood as multiplicities. In its conclusions, this article proposes that the kind of inquiry characteristic of artmaking can offer unique opportunities for understanding the complexities of the intersections of subjectivity and (be)coming out as a person with a mental illness
Eisenhauer, J. Admission: Madness and (Be)coming Out Within and Through Spaces of Confinement. Disability Studies Quarterly 29, (2009).
Leading with Panic. Why Leaders Need to Talk More Openly About Anxiety
By: Sanjit Sethi
Excerpt:
“Just over twenty years ago I was diagnosed with severe anxiety / panic disorder. I have been careful to only share my struggles around this illness with a few family members and close friends. That is, until now. I am a father, husband, son, brother, curator, artist, and president of a remarkable college of art and design. I have decided to speak about this now because I am witnessing an epidemic across our academic institutions, workplaces, and communities regarding anxiety and mental illness and believe we can no longer speak about this in the third person.”
Sethi, S. Leading with Panic. Medium https://medium.com/@sanjitsethi/leading-with-panic-bb6e076f4145 (2019).
Yale Will Not Save You
Excerpt:
“”I went to Yale” is shorthand for I have schizoaffective disorder, but I’m not worthless.”
Fatigue
By: Jennifer Acker
Description:
A work about chronic fatigue and its affects on her life as a writer and in academia as an editor and teacher.
“An inspiring true story about the twists of fate that challenge a couple’s expectations of love, marriage, and reliance.
Jennifer Acker and her husband had been married for eleven years when she was blindsided by a mysterious and undiagnosed incapacitation. Accustomed to their independent routines, they will have to reform both their lives to accommodate the enervating illness. As Jennifer’s sense of self falls away, however, the couple is struck again. Her husband’s “frozen shoulder” all but locks one side of his upper body, leaving him in excruciating pain, partially immobilized, and as dependent on Jennifer as she is on him. But their needs are not in competition. In communion and reciprocal caregiving, they learn to love—and to explore—each other anew.”
Common Academic Experiences No One Talks About: Repeated Rejection, Impostor Syndrome, and Burnout
By: Lisa Jaremka, Joshua M Ackerman, Bertram Gawronski, Nicholas O Rule, Kate Sweeny , Linda R Tropp, Molly A. Metz, Ludwin Molina, William S. Ryan, & S Brooke Vick
Abstract:
Academic life is full of learning, excitement, and discovery. However, academics also experience professional challenges at various points in their career, including repeated rejection, impostor syndrome, and burnout. These negative experiences are rarely talked about publicly, creating a sense of loneliness and isolation for people who presume they are the only ones affected by such setbacks. However, nearly everyone has these experiences at one time or another, and thus talking about them should be a normal part of academic life. The goal of this article is to explore and destigmatize the common experiences of rejection, impostor syndrome, and burnout by sharing a collection of short personal stories from scholars at various stages of their career with various types of academic positions. Josh Ackerman, Kate Sweeny, and Ludwin Molina discuss how they have dealt with repeated rejection. Linda Tropp, Nick Rule, and Brooke Vick share experiences with impostor syndrome. Finally, Bertram Gawronski, Lisa Jaremka, Molly Metz, and Will Ryan discuss how they have experienced burnout.
Jaremka, L. et al. Common Academic Experiences No One Talks About: Repeated Rejection, Impostor Syndrome, and Burnout. Perspectives on Psychological Science (2019).
Should Suicidal Students Be Forced to Leave Campus?
By Rachel Aviv
Excerpt:
“After three days in the hospital, W.P. was preparing to leave when his mother was informed, through a phone call from Princeton’s director of student life, that W.P. was no longer allowed to attend classes or return to his dorm. At a meeting the next day, two university administrators, who had reviewed some of W.P.’s medical records, expressed concern about the fact that he had checked himself out of the hospital a day early, against the hospital’s recommendation. They noted that this was his third suicide attempt in three years. (The previous two times he had been home with his parents, and, he said, the suicide attempts were pleas for attention.) The administrators urged him to voluntarily withdraw from the university for a year, so that he could get intensive psychiatric treatment. They explained that in cases where students pose a threat to themselves this was “always the outcome.” They told him that if he didn’t take a leave of absence he would be involuntarily withdrawn, which would be reflected on his transcript. They also instructed him that he was not permitted on campus.”
Aviv, R. Should Suicidal Students Be Forced to Leave Campus? The New Yorker. (2014).
A Prominent Economist’s Death Prompts Talk of Mental Health in the Professoriate
By: Emma Pettit
“Alan B. Krueger, a titan in economics, died by suicide last weekend. As colleagues and admirers mourned, they also engaged in a conversation about mental illness in the professoriate and how professional success does not suppress personal struggles.”
Pettit, E. A Prominent Economist’s Death Prompts Talk of Mental Health in the Professoriate. The Chronicle of Higher Education (2019).
How Colleges Today Are Supporting Student Mental Health
By: Amy L. Eva
“Colleges and universities are addressing well-being in students with new and innovative approaches.”
Eva, Amy L. How Colleges Today Are Supporting Student Mental Health. Greater Good (2019).
