Depression

"A provocative addition to Ann Cvetkovich's eloquent writings on the archives of public feelings, this book takes depression out of the space of the private into the complex politics of our time. Weaving together memoir, cultural and medical history, and literary and theoretical discussion, Cvetkovich experiments with and reflects on unconventional ways of writing about embodiment, cognition, and affect. Along the way, she offers myriad prescriptions, small and large, on how to cope with the daily effects of depression and how to heal the world."Marianne Hirsch, author of The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust "Combining cultural critique with nuanced readings of queer aesthetic practices, and mixing theoretical reflections on experience with experiments in memoir, Depression: A Public Feeling delivers not only critical insights but also wisdom. The book offers a model for something like collective or collaborative authorship; framed as a project conceived in concert with a far-flung community of academics, activists, and artists, Depression is a departure from academic business as usual. This is a profoundly inspiring book."Heather Love, author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History Aesthetics, anecdotes and evidence against the medical model. -- Tyler Cowen * New York Times Magazine * Depression: A Public Feeling sets out to challenge contemporary medical notions of depression that simultaneously relieve one of responsibility (its just genes or chemicals) and provide agency (you can fix it by taking a pill). . . . In anatomising her lived experience of writers block, Cvetkovich invites the reader to ask whether, despite the trade-specific terminology, this is still a symptom exclusive to writers. . . . [H]er perceptions are agile. -- Talitha Stevenson * New Statesman * Depression succeeds at opening up a public discussion on certain kinds of depression that are often dismissed as trivial, like the stress of academic labour. . . . [C]lear and helpful with a vision for overcoming melancholy through a transformation of everyday life. -- William Burton * Lambda Literary Review * [Cvetkovich] has taken some huge risks with Depression. Rather than building a traditional academic argument with research and theory, the book combines stylistically distinct and potentially disparate parts that add up to a highly readable, relatable, radical treatise that provides many points of entry and fresh thinking on one of the most overexamined subjects of the past few decades. -- Cindy Widner * Austin Chronicle * At one end, Depression is a call to expand how we frame and engage with depression, and at the other its an internal appeal to academia to accept personal experience as a valid source material for scholarship. By melding the personal and the academic, Cvetkovich is creating an important new forum for how we discuss depression. . . . The material is totally fascinating. . . . -- Nina Lary * Bitch * Cvetkovich offers us an introduction to thinking critically about depression's causes and its manifestations as well as, perhaps, the localised tactics that are necessary to enable recovery. At the end, she turns rather sweetly to crafting as one reparative habit, partly because of the aesthetic of connectivity that it can stimulate. Knitting yourself out of depression: it's kind of folksy, but I liked it. -- Sally Munt * Times Higher Education * The books merit is in jolting us out of our habit of thinking about depression as a personal, medical issue, reminding us of the ways in which the rules and roles of society influence our psyches and feelings about ourselves. By taking depression out of the exclusive domain of the therapeutic culture, [Cvetkovich] challenges us to make new connections between the individuals experience of depression and life within a depressive

Ann Cvetkovich is Ellen C. Garwood Centennial Professor of English and Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Texas, Austin. She is the author of An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures, also published by Duke University Press, and Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism; a coeditor of Political Emotions; and a former editor of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.

Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 Part I. The Depression Journals (A Memoir) Going Down 29 Swimming 43 The Return 62 Reflections: Memoir as Public Feelings Research Method 74 Part II. A Public Feelings Project (A Speculative Essay) 1. Writing Depression: Acedia, History, and Medical Models 85 2. From Dispossession to Radical Self-Possession: Racism and Depression 115 3. The Utopia of Ordinary Habit: Crafting, Creativity, and Spiritual Practice 154 Epilogue 203 Notes 213 Bibliography 243 Illustration Credits 265 Index 267