What type of study is this?

This is a Literature Review study.

September 5, 2025Open Access

Toward a Poetics of Stuckness: Poetry, Mental Disability, and Crisis

Key Points

The poem uses the form of a diagnostic survey to illustrate the connection between language and mental illness.
It highlights the overlap between economic crises and the medicalization of personal experiences, especially depression.
Neoliberalism’s individualization of crises contrasts with the collective nature of disability and dependency in societal discourse.
The work reflects on how poetry can provide insight into personal and collective states of anxiety and disorder.

Abstract

One of the opening poems in my 2017 poetry collection, If Pressed, titled “Depression Inventory”, takes as a poetic form the “Beck’s Depression Inventory”, a common diagnostic survey for assessing psychiatric risk. I wrote the poem in 2016 by answering the survey questions with the language of anxious speculation in the media about the ongoing economic situation in the aftermath of the 2008 recession. I recognized the medical model of mental illness and disability in these economic reports’ constant need to diagnose disorder, and an overlap in the language of illness and depression. Despite a socio-political imperative to separate and individualize spheres of life under neoliberalism, the language of madness, illness, medicalization, abnormality, disability, anxiety, depression, and dependency may be found ubiquitous in our forms of thinking and speaking about a multiplicity of personal and collective states-of-affairs.

Read Full Paperexternally

Ask AI

Helpful

Bookmark

View Full Paper