Humanities Reflecting on Depression
The humanities are a set of disciplines that focus on the human condition and its manifold expressions, including health and illness. Humanities research employs methods that are historical, analytical, interpretive and/or speculative in nature. Humanities scholars may question the meaning of contemporary works or practices or they may focus on developing a better understanding or interpretation of works, practices, and cultural contexts in the past.
The Medical Humanities is an interdisciplinary field that spans philosophy and the arts (literature, film, visual art), ethics, culture studies, and intersects with more humanistic social sciences: history of science, science and technology studies, and medical anthropology.
Books
The following subject searches will yield books and articles regarding representations of depression.
The UCLA Library, along with other libraries in the UC system, provides access to many books on the humanist interpretations of depression. When searching the UCLA Library Catalog (for resources at UCLA), you can use subject headings to narrow your search. Subject headings function like hashtags--for example, books on that focus on depression in art will likely be tagged with the subject heading "Depression — in art"
Below are a few examples of subject heading searches related to depression and the humanities. To learn more about working with subject headings, see this video tutorial (subject headings start at 1:58) or ask a librarian for help.
Selected Books from the UCLA Library Catalog
Black Dogs and Blue Words by
Black Dogs and Blue Words analyzes the rhetoric surrounding depression. Kimberly K. Emmons maintains that the techniques and language of depression marketing strategies--vague words such as "worry," "irritability," and "loss of interest"--target women and young girls and encourage self-diagnosis and self-medication. Further, depression narratives and other texts encode a series of gendered messages about health and illness. As depression and other forms of mental illness move from the medical-professional sphere into that of the consumer-public, the boundary at which distress becomes disease grows ever more encompassing, the need for remediation and treatment increasingly warranted. Black Dogs and Blue Words demonstrates the need for rhetorical reading strategies as one response to these expanding and gendered illness definitions.
Call Number: Biomed Library: WM 171 E54b 2010ISBN: 0813547202Date: 2010
Saturn and Melancholy: studies in the history of natural philosophy, religion and art (online) by Call Number: Also in print; Biomed Library BF798 .K65s 2019ISBN: 9780773559523Date: 2019
Black Sun by
In Black Sun, Julia Kristeva addresses the subject of melancholia, examining this phenomenon in the context of art, literature, philosophy, the history of religion and culture, as well as psychoanalysis. She describes the depressive as one who perceives the sense of self as a crucial pursuit and a nearly unattainable goal and explains how the love of a lost identity of attachment lies at the very core of depression's dark heart. In her discussion she analyzes Holbein's controversial 1522 painting "The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb," and has revealing comments on the works of Marguerite Duras, Dostoyevsky and Nerval. Black Sun takes the view that depression is a discourse with a language to be learned, rather than strictly a pathology to be treated.
Call Number: YRL: RC537 .K7513 1989ISBN: 0231067070Date: 1992
Mood Apart by
In A Mood Apart, one of the country's most distinguished psychiatrists--an internationally renowned authority in the field--examines mood disorder as an affliction of the self, exploring the human experience of manic depressive illness, rediscovering the human being within the diagnosis.
Call Number: Biomed: WM 171 W629m 1997ISBN: 9780465047253Date: 1997
Movies and Mental Illness (online) by Call Number: Also in print: Biomed: WM 49 W388m 2014ISBN: 9780889374614Date: 20142010 edition available at Arts Library.
Article Databases
Example searches in UC Library Search (Articles, books and more):
- Subjects: Depression AND Film (NOT "Economic Depression" "Great Depression"), Discipline: Film, Limit to Scholarly & Peer-Reviewed Sources - In this example, we are looking for scholarly and peer-reviewed resources on depression and film. To help focus the results, we have used an advanced search to exclude the terms "Economic Depression" and "Great Depression."
- Subject: "Psychoanalysis and literature" Keyword: Depression - In this example, we use a specific subject term ("Psychoanalysis and literature") with "Depression" as a keyword. This search is also limited to scholarly and peer-reviewed resources.
- Project MUSE This link opens in a new window
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Full text of current issues (from about 1990) of scholarly journals published by university presses, chiefly in the arts, humanities and social sciences. Browsable by discipline and full-text searchable across all disciplines. UCLA has access to Muse e-books published from 2017-present, plus a selected number of other e-book titles.
Example searches in Project Muse:
- JSTOR This link opens in a new window
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Full text of core scholarly journals from their beginning to approximately five years ago. Disciplines include botany, business, ecology, general science, humanities, mathematics, social sciences, statistics. Browsable by discipline and full-text searchable across all disciplines. UCLA has access to selected JSTOR e-books. - Gale Literature Criticism This link opens in a new window
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Searchable database that provides access to the literary criticism collections Classical and Medieval Literary Criticism (CMLC), Contemporary Literary Criticism (CLC), Drama Criticism (DC), Literature Criticism from 1400-1800 (LC), Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism (NCLC), Poetry Criticism (PC), Shakespeare Criticism (SC), Short Story Criticism (SSC), and Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism (TCLC). - MLA International Bibliography This link opens in a new window
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Indexes worldwide publications on literature, language, linguistics, folklore, film, television, and theater from 1923 to the present. See also the MLA Directory of Periodicals. - Art & Architecture Source This link opens in a new window
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Full-text coverage of more than 600 journals and 220 books on "a broad range of related subjects, from fine, decorative and commercial art, to various areas of architecture and architectural design." It wholly incorporates and significantly expands on the coverage and contents of the Art Full Text and Art Index Retrospective databases. Indexes illustrations. Coverage: late 1920s-present. - Performing Arts Periodicals Database This link opens in a new window
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Articles and reviews from a broad spectrum of the arts and entertainment industry - including dance, drama, theater, stagecraft, circus, opera, pantomime, puppetry, magic, performance art, film, television, and more. Former database title: International Index to Performing Arts (IIPA) Full Text.
Journals
UCLA researchers have access to these journals:
Bibliographies
Madness and Literature Network — has an extensive bibliography of first-person accounts of madness.