Clifford Whittingham Beers's A Mind That Found Itself (1908) was the literary spark that inaugurated the amorphous mental hygiene movement in the first decades of the twentieth century. Despite the book's relative obscurity in discussions of American literature, historians of psychiatry still invoke the idea that it is an "autobiography of genuine literary merit," suggesting that the link between the mental hygiene movement and the literary imaginary was not coincidental-it was constitutive. This paper provides a new aesthetic and political history of the idea of "mental health," pushing back against the prevailing view that Beers's book is a well-meaning instance of turn-of-the-century liberal progressivism that prioritized the patient's voice. It argues that Beers and his mental hygiene movement instead localized the health of the nation in the individual's mental health, giving aesthetic form to later practices of bio-psychiatric nation-making.
In classical Greece, philosophers and dramatists alike taught the requisites of ethics. This orientation makes it valuable to consider how a text like Sophocles's Trachiniae engages events that concern the hero Heracles, and specifically the manner of his death. The circumstances involve what today we call euthanasia, in this case voluntary active euthanasia as a result of Heracles's autonomous decision, but also assisted death insofar as Heracles's son Hyllus receives an imperative from his father. The discernible principles of morality in this play, perceived even through the normative ambiguity of the genre, speak strongly to contemporary bioethics discourse: That is, the tragic ethos of the Greek dramatists should not be dismissed from our deliberations.
Inspired by Sarah Jaquette Ray and Jay Sibara's call for more scholarship at the intersection of Critical Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities, this article offers an eco-crip analysis of Richard Powers's Bewilderment (2021), focusing on the character of Robin, a neurodivergent environmentalist, to trace the entangled representation of disability and nature in the novel. I first argue that the narrative articulates a complex representational system in which the framing of the neurodivergent protagonist as alternatively diseased and a supercrip risks supporting ableist assumptions and undercutting the novel's ecological critique. Subsequently, I propose that Bewilderment might also be productively interpreted through an eco-crip lens as a generative site of political possibility. Speculative fiction emerges here not only as a key site for diagnosing problematic cultural imaginaries, but also for envisioning more capacious relations between disability and nature.
