Pauline Picot // Being taken care of is serious. Being taken care of is the first thing you experience when you come to life. You surrender to another human being and in doing so, you establish your first human relationship. Being taken care of is belonging to someone; being the object of their care. Being…
Category: Mind, Brain and Behavior
Brave New World: Cyberpunk 2077’s novel depiction of mental illness
Steve Server // By now, many have heard of Cyberpunk 2077, even those not normally within the gamer-orbit. The early rollout of the game has been plagued by game-breaking glitches and unexpectedly poor graphics and performance. Beyond the controversial rollout—and underneath the typical blood and guts associated with violent role-playing games—Cyberpunk 2077 has something unique to say about mental…
From Rumi to Herman Hesse, A Contemplation on Optimism: Why Uncertainty is When Hope is Needed Most
Nitya Rajeshuni // I was followed only by the clouds, drifting across glass windowpanes, as I passed my regular landmarks—the coffee shop with live music, the endless roadblocks of construction, the redbrick campus then pink with cherry blossoms. While life is now beginning anew, there were many months in the dark slumber of the pandemic…
You Will Hear. On the Shareability of Physical and Psychological Suffering in Academia
As a French PhD candidate, I would like to question the shareability of pain in the particular context of academia. Indeed, physical and mental suffering among PhD students is a widely but unofficially admitted fact in the French academic milieu. Consequently, I decided to find out how things stood for my fellow PhD candidates.
“That Most Dreadful of All Human Calamities”: Bipolar Bodyminds in the Early United States
Timothy Kent Holliday // In the scant historiography of bipolar disorder, David Healy’s Mania stands out almost by default. The central premise of Healy’s book is one that most historians and medical humanities scholars would probably agree with: that disease is made, and that disease-making is a historical process. Healy explains in his conclusion: “Whatever view we…
The Beast Within: Mental Illness in Arto Paasilinna’s The Howling Miller
Avril Tynan // Throughout the nineteenth century, degeneration theory associated certain behaviours and physical and psychological pathologies with a pseudo-Darwinian atavism of primitive traits and characteristics. One need only think of Émile Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series, and particularly his 1890 novel La bête humaine (The Beast in Man or The Beast Within), to note the parallels…
Your Brain on Politics: What Neuroscience Reveals about Political Orientation and Sense of Humor
James Belarde// “Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.” -Douglas Adams, in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe On April 29, 2006, an unexpected performance went exactly as anyone should have expected. Having been invited as the featured entertainer at that…
Meanings of Empathy for a Politics of Care
Erica Cao // It wasn’t until the 1900s that psychologist Edward Titchener translated the German word, “einfühlung,” from a concept of aesthetics into the English word, “empathy,” of human understanding that we know today. The relatively recent birth of the word seems to be gaining ever more use in popular discourse. In the wake of…
T in the Time of Coronavirus
Diana Rose Newby // Why has COVID-19 killed more men than women? As the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 continues its global spread, infection patterns and fatality rates have prompted this question both among medical experts and in the popular media. As of late April, data confirmed this disparity in multiple regions of the world: in China,…
To be or not to be (sad)?: Engaging with negative emotions
Bríd Phillips // Recently I came across research on Shakespeare and positive emotions which made the point that the field of the History of Emotions has focused almost exclusively on the so-called negative emotions represented by writers in the early modern period. This statement gave me pause. I examined the work I had myself attended…
