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This book concludes with a postscript that presents two important sources of information for people with mental illness, both of which are web sites: the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (www.samhsa.gov) and the National Alliance on Mental Illness (www.nami.org). SAMHSA is one of the country's two federal mental health agencies while NAMI is a leading mental health advocacy organization. The two sites contain information on mental disorders, the latest in treatment options, how to connect with others with similar needs, and books and articles on mental illness. The SAMHSA site has sections titled “Treatment Locators” and “Browse by Topic,” whereas the NAMI site has the subheadings “Inform Yourself” and “Find Support.”

Chapter two provides an in-depth discussion of Bebe Moore Campbell’s activism as a mental health advocate from 1999-2006 based on interviews with colleagues, family, and friends. It narrates her personal struggle with a daughter who is bipolar and the proactive stance that she took to cope with this difficulty. The chapter reveals how her involvement in the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), her role as a national spokesperson, and her local activism sparked the birth of the NAMI-Urban LA chapter, serving black and Latino communities. Campbell and a group of black women concerned about their children with mental illness effectively addressed the practical needs of families of color by challenging stigma, lobbying for social policies, and providing information, support, and resources both locally and on a national stage. Considering gendered racial communities as the resource and landscape for much of Campbell’s work, it appears that she maintained a broad friendship circle beyond the Black Action Society and NAMI- Urban LA. Exploring this primarily female “embedded friendship network” further evidences Campbell’s commitment to community and family and broadens context of her activism, writing, and life trajectory.

In chapter 7, “Deranged Psychopaths and Victims Who Go Insane: Visibility and Invisibility in the Depiction of Mental Health and Illness in Contemporary Legend,” Diane E. Goldstein analyzes the portrayal of mental illness in contemporary legends, focusing on the values inherent in depictions of demented killers, quietly “mad” neighbors, and psychologically damaged victims. Taken as a group and read as parallel texts, Goldstein argues that these narratives construct and present a complex of images of mental health and illness set in changing historical and cultural contexts. Together, she asserts, the narratives create explanatory categories for mental illness and convey popular understandings of “madness”; they equate insanity with visibility of difference; they explore the gendered associations of male aggression and female passivity, and they pinpoint areas of socially tolerable and intolerable deviance.

This chapter shows the key role played by patient labour in the birth, development, and decline of the hospital treatment of the mentally ill in the United States. Patient labour was present at the birth of the asylum, as a key feature of both theory and practice. In the late nineteenth century, its change to non-therapeutic drudgery corresponded with the ascendance of custodial pessimism and the warehousing of the chronically ill poor. Its revival at the start of the twentieth century was engineered by an optimistic alliance of psychotherapists, clergy and physicians, reflecting the national mood of expansionism and financial promise. Soon, however, both Freudians and harried hospital bureaucrats put an end to the idea that work would help individuals overcome their symptoms and re-direct their inner resources. In public asylums it was succeeded by non-therapeutic labour that hospitals relied upon for economic survival. When the asylums were dismantled in the 1970s and 1980s, legal attacks on unpaid patient work played a key role.

This chapter situates Judge Daniel Paul Schreber's vision of the non-Jewish unmanned Wandering Jew (or “Eternal Jew”; der ewige Jude) in relation to contemporaneous constructions of the Wandering Jew as soteriological figure and antisemitic stereotype. Specifically, it undertakes analyses of Wolfgang Kirchbach's play The Last Men, Henri Meige's psychiatric monograph The Wandering Jew in the Salpêtrière, and Oskar Panizza's short narrative “The Operated Jew.” The chapter then presents Schreber's own gendered and ethnic characterization of the “Eternal Jew” and demonstrates his overlooked identification with that figure in his Memoirs of My Mental Illness. It explores the conditions for Schreber's identification by placing it in the context of devirilizing representations of Jewish men, his family ties to the Leipzig's Jewish community, and to his apparent syphilophobia.

Despite ongoing advances in understanding the causes and prevalence of mental health issues, stigmatizing language is still often directed at people who have mental illness. Such language is regularly used by parties, such as the media, who have great influence on public opinion and attitudes. Since the decisions from Canadian courtrooms can also have a strong impact on societal views, we asked whether judges use stigmatizing language in their decisions. To answer this question, we conducted a qualitative study by searching through modern Canadian case law using search terms that were indicative of stigmatizing language. We found that, although judges generally use respectful language, there are still many instances where judges unnecessarily choose words and terms that are stigmatizing towards people with mental illness. We conclude that, to help reduce the stigma associated with mental illness, judges should be more careful with their language.

YouTube, the free Internet video-sharing platform, is home to an active community of people who performatively share personal experience narratives about mental illness. Many individuals in this group heed YouTube’s early call to “Broadcast Yourself” in order to publicly “put a face” to mental illness, particularly in the form of vlogs that document and share their experience. In chapter 8, “Broadcasting the Stigmatized Self: Positioning Functions of YouTube Vlogs on Bipolar Disorder,” Darcy Holtgrave engages this phenomenon through a selection of vloggers who discuss bipolar disorder and the folk groups surrounding them. The parameters of YouTube inherently define and influence users’ exchanges, which are mediated by digital devices and take the form of videos, video responses, text responses, the prefabricated categories of likes and views, and/or interaction with other forms of social media. Using narrative theory, Holtgrave analyzes the strategies that speakers use to negotiate their place in relation to their audience as well as their mental illness.

The chapter focuses on three poems Celan write for his thirteen-year-old son, Eric, in 1968. These poems are read against the background of the May ’68 student uprisings in Paris, in which both father and son took part; in the context of the poet’s own increasingly unstable mental condition and the potential danger he came to pose to his wife, his son and himself; and in view of the poet’s suicide less than two years later. Of particular relevance to the poems written at this time was the delusion from which Celan suffered that poetry was demanding of him that he re-perform “the sacrifice of Abraham,” that, in short, he was being made to choose between poetry and his son. The chapter examines the various ways Celan sought to negotiate this “terrible alternative” as he wrote poems to and about his son, about the relationship between poetry and paternity, but also and perhaps above all about translation and a time to come.