Care & Context: a creative approach to politicising mental health

Through a combination of critical and creative writing, my thesis aims to establish poetry as a viableintervention into the politicisation of mental health issues. The World Health Organisation states that'depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide... with more than 300 million people affected... [and]800,000 people dying due to suicide every year' (Brunier). Current mainstream approaches to mental illnesshave been confined to the individual. There is a wealth of literature detailing how 'mental illness has beendepoliticised' (Mark Fisher), how 'within [the current] framework, individual behaviour is decontextualisedfrom social circumstances' (Trivelli) and how 'it is customary... to attribute these feelings [of depression andmental illness] to bad things that happened to us when we were children... [or] as the result of abiochemical disorder' (Cvetkovich). My thesis aims to recontextualise mental health within ourcontemporary political moment with its subjection of individuals to slow violence. The forms of slowviolence I refer to include but aren't limited to social inequality, homelessness, social isolation, and thedisinterest of the welfare state. I will reveal through this recontextualization how mental illness is bound upwithin these relations of power. I will be writing a sequence of poetry in three parts, eliding traditionalpoetic forms through prose poetry, a situationist-detournement of found text and a lyric-essay. Trivellirecognises that "from the damp room of depression, words often fail, discourses collapse." If mental illnessis a place where language and critical thinking fall short, can poetry harness this breakdown of language,allowing words to tremble, garner new resonance, and open up new sites of communication andunderstanding? Can a space be created within these new sites of communication and understanding for anapproach to care and mental health which accounts for the subjection of the individual to slow violence?