Annotated Bibliography: Mental Illness in the Tragedies

Title:  Overcoming the Stigma:  Mental Illness in Shakespeare’s Day and Ours

Thesis: Although there is a great mental illness stigma present in today’s society, deconstructing Shakespeare’s characters will allow us to see how ordinary individuals develop mental illness and the necessity of getting medical attention.

Annotated Bibliography:

Arboleda-Flórez, Julio and Norman Sartorius eds. Understanding the Stigma of Mental Illness: Theory and Interventions. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2008. Web. 30 November 2015.  <http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/book/10.1002/9780470997642>

This article talks about how the stigma of mental illness came about historically.  This is going to help me to explain how the stigma exists and prove in a way that it truly does exist.  Then from there I will be able to jump into my thesis and how Shakespeare is related to that.

Somerville, H. Madness In Shakespearian Tragedy. London: The Richards Press LTD., 1969. Print.

This is a book that goes through several of the tragedies talking about how madness developed in key characters.  This book is going to help me look at the characters’ development of mental illness so that I can show how they were normal people with many internal conflicts that would have been fine if they would have had the necessary mental health services available to them.  Ultimately teaching us that we don’t have to be worried about a stigma to get the help we need, instead we should be worried about not getting help.

Chan, K.K.S. and W.W.S Mak. "The Prevalence of Stereotype Self-concurrence and Habitual Self-stigma in a Community Sample of People with Mental Illness." European Psychiatry 28-31 March 2015: 1375. Web. 30 November 2015.  <http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092493381531066X>

This is a report of a survey that was taken which basically says that people with mental illness put the stereotype on themselves making the mental illness more difficult.  This goes along the lines of one of my claims with King Lear in which he dreaded going mad and that was one of the reasons why he went mad.  So it can back up that point and show how a stigma whether self-imposed or imposed by the public can lead people to not get the help they need and the condition can worsen.

Freidl, M., T. Lang and M. Scherer. "How psychiatric patients perceive the public's stereotype of mental illness." Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology 38.5 (2003-05): 269-75. Web. 30 November 2015.  <http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00127-003-0626-3#>

This journal article draws on several surveys talking about the mental illness stigma and how it affects the public and the mentally ill.  I think it will help me not only further establish my thesis, but it will also give my paper a so-what.  The so-what being that all people are affected by this whether mentally ill or not, and so we need to overcome this mental illness stigma issue.

Hom, Melanie A., Ian H. Stanley and Thomas E. Joiner Jr. "Evaluating factors and interventions that influence help-seeking and mental health service utilization among suicidal individuals: A review of the literature." Clinical Psychology Review 27 May 2015: 28-39. Web. 30 November 2015. <http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272735815000768>

This talks about the factors that cause people to not take advantage of mental health services.  By seeing all of the factors determined through several surveys it will better support my thesis in that people don’t take advantage of the mental health services.  It also suggests that the stigma of mental illness can be the cause to all of the other supposed causes of not taking advantage of mental health services.

Thiher, Allen. Revels in Madness: Insanity in Medicine and Literature. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1999. Print.

This book talks about how insanity was treated in Shakespeare’s time or in better words, how it wasn’t treated.  This is going to help me in my argument by showing that the characters in Shakespeare’s plays had tragic endings because the help was not available.  In contrast, people do not need to be like that today because of all the help that is available to us.

Schomerus, Georg, Herbert Matschinger and Matthias C. Angermeyer. "Traces of Freud - The Unconscious Conflict as a Cause of Mental Disorders in the Eyes of the General Public." Psychopathology (2008): 173-178. Web. 23 November 2015.

This is a survey that is based off of Freud's philosophy that mental disorders are caused by unconscious conflict.  The survey shows that it is.  This is going to help me to be able to show how the characters of King Lear, Othello, and Macbeth were normal people with conflicts that led them to developing a mental illness.  Therefore demonstrating that there should not be a stigma against people who develop a mental illness because anyone can.  I also am going to use this to do more research on Freud's philosophy on the subject.