The Grand Mentalisms Reference Project

The Grand Mentalisms Reference Project is something I have had in mind for a while. At the moment of starting, I am stuck in omphaloskepsitis (navel-gazing-itis) and I am glad to have thought of something to offer up that's more in tune with the original purpose of this blog.

I am asking all of you who read to save up and share any and all references you come across in literature, journalism, blogs, television, magazines, movies, day to day conversation, scholarly articles, academically dubious articles and sources: in short, anything that reflects a popular conception of the nature of mental illness and especially the perceived nature or character of those who are mentally interesting, negative or positive. I would also welcome more selective contributions from older (pre-1970) psychiatric and psychological texts.

My aim is to build up a database of popular references to mental illness so that, in true pragmatist philosophy mode, I can gain a fuller idea of what exists in the minds of the living, the influences that shapes these perceptions and the historical discursive context of current understandings of mental illness in the popular social dialectic. With this understanding, I hope to be better able to address mentalisms philosophically in a more relevant way.

If you're not sure whether a reference you have come across is relevant to this project, just go ahead and stick it up anyway. I need your help and I welcome and appreciate any and all contributions.

When posting a reference, please try to give sufficient citation in whatever form. Sufficient citation for anything in print would consist of the date of publication, author, publisher, page number and title. For blogs, as much as can be gathered of the publication citation plus a link would be great. For conversational references, date, time, local and a brief description of the relationship between the participants (e.g. psychiatrist to patient, parent to child who is mentally interesting) would be appreciated. Names and personal details are not requested or necessary. If you do not have all of the information requested, don't worry, just give as much as you are able.

I am particularly interested in anything that strikes you as a recurring conception and particularly interested in anything that strikes you as unusual.

With your help, I hope to make a useful contribution to political philosophy and, eventually, public policy for the greater good of the mentally interesting and the benefit of greater understanding to the non-mentally interesting. Thank you in advance and know that I will faithfully give due credit to any aid you can afford me in this project.

I Live in a Strange Part of the Country

One of the great things about a proper snowstorm is seeing the school cancellations. On the local television stations, there's a news crawl at the bootom of the screen that says which schools are closed and when there's snow enough in South Carolina, as there was today, then one can see all the bizarre names that South Carolinians give to their daycare centers. These include, but are not limited to, the following:

His Watchmen Daycare Center
Around the Son Daycare
Sonshine Nursery
Li'l Lambs Daycare
Luv-n-stuff 1 and too
Kids Kountry Klub Center
All God's Children CEC
Dayspring Tutorials

It took me awhile to figure out that all the 'son' things were not misspelled but rather references to Jesus. This is the thing about South Carolina: cross the border and all of a sudden there are billboards alongside the road and those billboards feature either God or "nekked ladies", as they say. Sometimes there's one for the lottery or fireworks, as well. But for every billboard advertising the virtues of various 'gentleman's clubs,' there is a billboard urging everyone to 'get right with God.'

It's Southern Baptist country.

I can't make too much mock, though. People in my bit of North Carolina rely far too much on geographical signifiers to name things. What could one expect, really, from people who live in an area designated as Western North Carolina? Something like half of all schools, business, organizations and similar have 'mountain' somewhere in their names or are name after a particular mountain. This is further modified by the frequent use of cardinal directions in names. Then, my town is full of lefties and 60s radicals turned semi-conventional, so we tend to get hippie-ish names such as Bell's School for People under Six or that have 'creative', 'community' or 'new' somewhere in there.

Ultimate school name for Bairdville**? South Green Mountain Community School for the Creative Arts.

I never cease to be entertained by living here. The last time I was out, I heard a story featuring the infamous contra twins* and we recently had a tree hugger's parade at the university. It's a big enough place to have its own opera company but small enough that it's hard to meet someone you haven't already met or that isn't friends with at least two of your friends. Or their grandmother went to your church, or their cousin is best friends with your ex-girlfriend's best friend's ex-boyfriend. It's always something and heaven forfend that I should run errands with messy hair or untidily dressed because I will always run into someone. There are bars that I cannot go to without seeing someone from church. It has been a good two or three years since I went to any kind of art event without seeing someone I know. This is great for people that one likes but not for people one would rather avoid. I like it, though, generally speaking. It makes a change from London.

*for all those of you who don't live in WNC, contra dancing is a hybrid of English country dancing, as featured in Jane Austen movies, and square dancing. The dances have set figures that are called before the dance starts and use repeated movement patterns. The dance itself weaves two lines of people together. One couple will dance with another couple in a square formation of four people and at the end of the figure, one couple will move up the line to the left and the other will move down the line to the right, where each couple will then make new squares with the next couple up or down the line. That sounds more complicated than it is.
There are two main regular contra dances each week, one in town and the other out in Tahkieostie**. The one in Tahkieostie has a younger crowd and they all tend to sleep together in various gender and number pairings and often jump naked into the nearby lake on hot summer nights after dancing. I will leave you to imagine how twins could, in this setting, become infamous.

Here is a picture of contra dancing, posted on flickr by northfield.org. Please note the leftist political banners in the background and the presence of same sex couples. It is fun. I've never jumped into the lake, though.

**To protect the privacy of my current locale, all names have been changed.

Thesisizing

Hmm. . . I should look up the original Greek for thesis and make the verb form that way but I'll save that fascinating information for the next post.

I'm in thesis-land for the weekend. I'm writing my thesis on the non-fiction works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Most people know her from her short story "The Yellow Wallpaper," which is far and away the best piece of fiction she ever wrote, but hardly anybody reads her non-fiction anymore. I'm interested in placing her in the Pragmatist tradition alongside Dewey, James, DuBois and company. She is often claimed as a sociologist but she called herself a philosopher and due to her total lack of quoted statistics, I am inclined to think that she designated herself correctly. Those sociologists: they claim Durkheim and DuBois and Weber and almost any philosopher from 1850 on who wrote about social philosophy. Very naughty of them to poach so.

Gilman's major non-fiction work is "Women and Economics." In this book she puts forward the still startling idea that women have a right to specialized labor outside the home. A right, not a privilege. She supported universal kindergarten, early childhood education, and daycare. She, having been deprived of it herself, said that women must have the same opportunities for formal education as men and then the same employment prospects. She very strongly emphasized the importance of the nature of the work over the amount of pay.

Gilman thought it immoral that anyone should have to do work that they were not suited for because they needed more money. She thought it immoral that women were kept in the home to cater to the needs of its habituants exclusively, conducting endless undifferentiated labor (i.e. switching from cleaning to mending to teaching to cooking and back and forth all the day long.) Women, she thought, had as much right to be a part of the world, voting and working, as men did because they were human also. Too much emphasis had been placed on sex characteristics rather than human characteristics and we had forgotten that women were human before they were women.

This resulted in an excess of romanticism, poor female physiology, prostitution, disease (venereal) and the immolation of half of the world's abilities on the altar of the idea of home. To replace what Gilman considered to be an archaic idea of the home, she proposed the construction of apartment buildings with communal gardens, day care centers, exercise centers, restaurants and apartments with no kitchens. She thought that the kitchenless home would be a healthier place, freeing women from the labor of preparing food or having to fix two dinners, one for children and one for the husband, and also make the home easier to clean. Everyone must have a room of his or her own: privacy was essential to humanity and women, in particular, had been too long denied any such sanctuary.

Gilman was sufficiently well known in her time that several such apartment buildings were actually constructed and a few still exist in the Northeast. Her ideas were similar to those of Melusina Fay Peirce, a philosopher in her own right married to Charles S. Peirce the pragmatist philosopher, but she was more radical in that she suggested that women should be allowed to have the same kinds of work as men while Peirce took women out of the home to work co-operatively but also to work at women's labor (sewing, cooking and so on.)* Both put forward the idea of sharing the labor of the household communally in order to save expense and women's time.

I could go on and on, which I suppose means that I have done my research and that is a good, but I shall stop here for now and in the next post or so I'm going to dig in to the problem of work with reference to Gilman, having been inspired by this post of Kate's on the Agonies and the Ecstasies.

*See "Co-operative Housekeeping," Peirce, Mrs. Charles S. It's out of print but can be found on Google books. A fascinating read.