Sarah Kane's world of depression : the emergence and experience of mental illness in 4.48 psychosis
Anna Ovaska, Justus Liebig University Giessen
University writing server of the Justus Liebig University Giessen 2016 DOI: 10.22029/jlupub-7031 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Topics | Depression |
| Citations | 3 |
| Key points | Argues that Sarah Kane's play 4.48 Psychosis constructs the experiential world of severe, psychotic depression in ways consistent with phenomenological accounts, portraying it as an emergent phenomenon involving alterations in embodied being-in-the-world. Contends that the play's intertextual, narrative, and poetic strategies convey the phenomenal world of depression and that treating it requires a deeper understanding than medicalizing psychiatry provides. |
Abstract
Fictional narratives of mental illnesses often focus on individual experiences of pain, anxiety and suffering. As such, narratives depict the experiences of illness in a holistic way, revealing the embodied, situated and intersubjective in other words, emer-gent nature of psychiatric disorders. They are thus able to create a different kind of understanding of mental disorders than medicalizing strands of psychiatry that tend to reduce mental illnesses to biological dysfunctions of the brain and the nervous system and thus ignore how disorders straddle the brain, the body and the environment.In this article, I discuss how the experiential world of depression is constructed and conceived of in Sarah Kane s play 4.48 Psychosis. Kane s depiction of severe, psychotic depression is in line with phenomenological accounts of the illness, in which depression is understood as an emergent phenomenon that gives rise to altera-tions in the embodied being-in-the-world of the subject. The text refers to common cognitive-affective experiences and folk-psychological understandings of the mind and employs different intertextual, narrative and poetic strategies to convey the phe-nomenal world of depression to its readers. In addition, Kane emphasizes that to treat depression a deeper understanding of this state of emergency is needed than what medicalizing psychiatry is able to provide.
Comparable studies
Other theoretical and historical papers on depression, most cited first.
| Study | Year | Design | Participants |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy for depression | 2006 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Psilocybin-assisted therapy of major depressive disorder using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy as a therapeutic frame | 2020 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| The Yale Manual for Psilocybin-Assisted Therapy of Depression (using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy as a Therapeutic Frame) | 2020 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Neuroinflammation and neuroprogression in depression: Effects of alternative drug treatments | 2022 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Improving cognitive functioning in major depressive disorder with psychedelics: A dimensional approach | 2021 | Theoretical or philosophical paper |