Final Project Report
Project Report
Representing Depression: Aesthetics, Insight, and Activism
Dr Stephen Shapiro
Summary
Contradicting the notion that “mental illness is some sort of disease entity, like an infection or
a malignancy,” clinician Thomas Szasz argues that, “what people now call mental illnesses
are, for the most part, communications expressing unacceptable ideas, often framed in an
unusual idiom.” Szasz claims that the concept of “mental illness is a myth, whose function it
is to disguise and thus render more palatable the bitter pill of moral conflicts in human
relations,” the problems in living under regimes of economic, political, or socio-psychological
oppression. My project used a combination of cultural studies, memoirs of depression, and
practices of stress reduction to investigate the claim that depression is not a personal fault,
biological malady requiring pharmaceutical intervention, or disability (as current EU law
claims), but a proto-politicized language of resistance that expresses an individual’s often
paraconscious response to dominant forms of social injustice and (patriarchal, racial, and
bourgeois) power.
Sociologist (and clinically-defined depressive) David Karp speaks about the dialectic of
depression, where a main symptom of depression, the inability to “speak about sadness”,
often blocks the personal connections that might help overcome incapacitating feelings of
isolation. Consequently, it is a truism that depression is unlike obsession. While obsession has
by definition a narrative of action, a tale about “doing”, depression seems to have no language
or metaphorical instrument to describe or analyze its effects on the individual. How do you
tell a story about “nothing,” depression as an experience that seems to have fallen outside of
time and the structures of communication that convey personal (and social) action?
It seems worthwhile, if not crucial, to take up this problem of social interaction for a range of
reasons. Firstly, depression is recognized as increasing in scope and appearance in
contemporary (British) society, creating tremendous human and social costs. Additionally, the
forefront of depression are adolescents and young adults, who are being treated for a
spectrum of mood disorders on a scale greater than was even the case as little as three decades
ago.
Beyond this immediate context, depression’s seeming silences can be considered as a way of
thinking about other kinds of social absences, like those involving the cultural history of nondominant figures. Only relatively recently have we begun to realize the role of those who
were “absent” from the historical record: women, ethnic and racial minorities, lesbians, gay,
and the transgendered, the working classes, the colonized. The theme of depression can thus
be used as a lens for exploring a wider host of matters. More locally, the experience of
depression stands as a challenge to conventional forms of dramatic expression. If depression
simply does not operate through the manifestations of “acceptable” or consecrated forms of
narrative, then its performance suggests that an entirely different mode of “theatrics” needs to
be teased out. Indeed, one possible means of understanding the distinction between “drama”
and “performance” (as in the split between modes of performance art and more conventional
theatre) was the recognition that traditional means of staging and enacting narrative
structurally misses an entire realm of social feeling.
Tied to these concerns was my dissatisfaction with what have become the standard frames of
reference for university teaching in England, a discomfort accrued after nearly ten years at
Warwick as a full-time staff member. At the risk of unself-critical nostalgia, I have noticed a
change in student culture during this time as we increasingly receive the students who were
educated under the New Labour assessment culture that emphasized examinations as a means
of adjudicating “quality control”. The result has been a student culture that is less creative,
capable of social interaction, and empowered to participate in public and complex decisionmaking about the allocation of social resources. The traditional role of university education, a
training in “civil society” through the interaction of generations (teacher-student
conversational exchange), has been limited by the new regulatory culture and increased
professional pressures on staff that draw them away from student contact outside of the
classroom. Additionally, the limited time of seminar contact for each module, including the
longer options, often held in small rooms, due to constraints of the material plant, do not give
time and space enough for productive conversations to occur.
The heart of the project then was not only to use a new pedagogical model to analyze
depression, but also to explore a new model of socializing pedagogy. In essence, the module
attempted to create the conditions of a (New England) liberal arts college experience within
the form of a British university. Typically the model for staff-student contact has been the
Oxbridge tutorial. Yet this idealized model is unsatisfactory for contemporary society, given
its refusal of the group seminar experience, where students learn to engage with each other
and learn through collective discussion. Furthermore, the classic Oxbridge model trains
students to be disputative, rather than consensual, to advance and relentlessly hold strongly
ideas. Oxbridge’s more confrontational and antagonistic model has perhaps created the
grounds for the current impasse in British society, as it legitimizes the juvenile yammering
that forms the routine of Westminster parliamentary process and ministerial bullying of the
populace.
Instead, the project attempted to create more time for developing group intellectual inquiry as
well as a technique wherein the staff member is less visible as a controlling director of the
seminar. The commonsensical view is that excellent teaching must be charismatic. But
student excitement in learning needs not only come through the witnessing of an engaging
performance by the teacher, and indeed, this may be an obstacle in itself, since students
themselves do not learn how to generate their own skills and enjoyment in learning. The
charismatic teacher might not necessarily be the most effective one for the long-term of a
student’s post-university existence. How then to create a seminar that combines all aspects?
Activity
The module met twice weekly: once for a 40-50 minute meditation session and once for a
two-hour seminar. It was important that the students saw each other more than simply once a
week in order to facilitate a greater number of encounters. More contact moments help create
an esprit de corps, but also multiply the possibilities for students to speak with each other
outside of the formal times of the seminars. Small conversations before and after class are the
social glue that holds most creative communities together. Here the relative isolation of the
Capital Centre from the core campus and the Humanities building proved a strength, since
students often had to spend more time with each other in transit, especially true given the
limited traffic pathways to the building, which constrained isolating dispersion patterns.
The seminar experience followed, more or less, a familiar pattern of three parts. The first
involved 30 minutes of “lecturette” time, where I explained aspects of the week’s reading that
were difficult or helped establish the rationale and trajectory of the assigned readings. Then
came small group-work, of 3-4 students each, where students came together to speak about
the readings. There were usually no discussion questions set as tasks, so as to allow for a
student-centered freedom to determine, through group conversation, what interested them.
During this phase, I usually left the room, to display my trust in their seriousness. The last
section involved the seminar coming back to sit together in a circle. Each student then had to
speak to the group. Ideally, and even here there were time constraints, every student spoke to
the group at least once every session. The goal was to establish conversational flows from
student comments, rather than seminar leader’s questions.
The pairing of small-group and structured large-group helped to overcome student hesitation
in speaking before a large group. Because they had the small-group discussions, students had
a “safer” and less daunting environment to test out ideas. Because the large-group responses
went around the circle, the group discussion was less vulnerable to being dominated by a few
speakers and there was literally no room to hide or dodge from participating in the
conversations. Everyone in the room knew that she or he would be called on to speak, but this
was done in a fashion where students could “warm-up” to participating.
The seminar readings were an effort to present an interdisciplinary study to depression that
drew from a cultural studies model first developed in the UK at the Birmingham Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies, where I was partially trained. Since the CCCS no longer
exists, its pedagogical lessons have become harder to find in living teaching practice. As a
group we initially read a set of depression memoirs. These were followed by sociologically
oriented accounts that linked the rise in depression to the effects of modern (capitalist) society
and its tendency to isolate people into soulless competitors. Lastly, we turned to read memoirlike accounts of social activism and community building as a response to individual alienation
and lack of interpersonal communication. In addition to more traditional forms of assessment
in the shape of essays, students also had to do a group video project in which they were asked
to take the theoretical argument of Michel Foucault and present in the form of a first-person
account modeled on the performance art of Spaulding Gray. The point here was to be able to
take an academic argument and learn how to translate it into a more popular vernacular and
idiom.
The meditation sessions involved listening to instruction tapes in the techniques of a NorthAmericanized Vipassana (insight) meditation. After this initial training, the following weeks
included the practice of actual meditation. The purpose of these sessions was three-fold.
Firstly, it was a community-building exercise that did not involve assessment. Secondly, it
followed social science methodology where practitioners must themselves experience the
form of practice: in this case, a strand of meditative cognitive behavior therapy that has
become increasingly prevalent in depression therapy. Thirdly, it served as a practical
application of the distinction between consciousness and cognition that several of the authors
read in the seminar presented as a means of understanding a response to depression.
Additionally, its paraperformativity explored a different route to the plumbing of personal
interiority associated with Grotowski, given the mediation’s reluctance to assign import to
emotion-intensities as a means of truth-revelation.
My fellowship tested the principles of the CAPITAL center in that it cemented performative
and dramatic aspects into the module, not only by investigating material that has implications
for the narrative nature of performance but also by including performance, in the embodied
practice of the meditation. The project’s small-group work, workshop-like large-group
discussions, and collective- video projects foregrounded trust and teamwork.
As students reported: “I very much appreciated the amount of compulsory group discussions
done in this module as they not only give skills of public speaking, but relay heavily upon
public listening.” Another said that, ““I leant aside from the literature context, how to
participate more effectively in a group. Really enjoyable.” Lastly, one admitted that, “I often
suffer from nerves in seminars and feel intimidated to talk, having the small groups meant
that I could discuss my ideas comfortably and feel more confident in sharing them with the
whole class later.” Others report that, “It built my confidence in talking about the real world,”
and that “my attendance for this module was probably better than for the rest of my course
put together which I think speaks very much in favor of the course structure and S.S.’s
teaching methods.”
Outcome
The project has ended and all the student materials have been assessed, except for the second
essay. In my estimation the project has been very successful. The student feedback
assessments (attached as appendix) are quite possibly the most generous I have ever received
in my teaching career, and the group has independently decided to continue meeting in term
three, indicating that they found the material and questions relevant to their lives and
intellectual pursuits.
As one student reported, ““The module has inspired me to think outside of the box, it has
reinvigorated my passion for learning which I have felt has often been stifled in the rigid
structures of university teaching. Seminars have been truly enlightening in comparison to
others which I dread due to the awkward silences and the need to “show off”! This module
has been more than about depression, it has been about life, and society and has change my
perception of learning.” The interdisciplinary nature was praised: “One of the best things
about the module as I feel it encompassed literature, psychology, sociology, economics and
politics, I feel I have learned more than I anticipated and feel wider read than any module I
have studied.”
Others comments include a belief that “It is an important course, unlike any other, and gives
students the space to think not only creatively but in wider social and personal terms. A
module that relates to us on a personal level—important when no other module addresses the
self and real human relationships.”
Another student reports that, “It is like nothing I’ve ever studied …It has given me great
confidence and has encouraged my development more than any other module.” One student
said, “Before this year I was disillusioned with the education system at Warwick, but this
module has reawakened my interest in learning and has taught me a lot.” Others reported: “It
was the best module I did at Warwick, and it was the only course that really felt how I
imagined being at University would feel. I looked forward to Thursday mornings.” “It has
been invaluable and I will treasure what I have learnt.” “It changed me for the better as a
person. It inspired me. Best module I will take at uni!”
Lastly, one wrote that, “I would very much like to thank Stephen Shapiro for his innovation,
bravery, and dedication to education and spreading of his ideas!”
The origins of the project lay in a mini-module on depression that I taught at Warwick four
years ago, as well as my ongoing research interests in social movements and the cultural
history of mood in an increasingly capitalist United States. The project changed mainly in that
the syllabus was slightly changed due to new publications, but otherwise it proceeded as
planned.
Implications
1. The modules offered in the English and Comparative Literary Studies department
should broaden thier perspective often confined by a limited definition of “literature”
and even “history”. There is a great student hunger, in spite of its newness and difficulty, for
more interdisciplinary and cultural studies oriented material. Attached to this would be
undergraduate degree reform, given that the current degree allows for too limited an
opportunity for student learning.
2. The standard time for option seminars should be expanded from 90 minutes to 120
minutes and teaching credit adjusted accordingly. I have taught 2-hour long seminars 5
times over my ten years at Warwick. In each case, the average achievement of the module
was noticeably greater than the other modules. The extra 30 minutes crosses a threshold that
allows time for more experimental teaching methods and projects, as well as small-group
work. I’ve been especially convinced about the latter. Until about 4 years ago, I looked on
small-group work with great suspicion; now I can’t imagine teaching without it. For
complicated reasons, English students have a great discomfort level in speaking publicly. But
they have a great willingness to do so in smaller groups. The small-group work can help ease
them into larger group discussion (see above description), which is the bedrock of a
democratic civil society.
3. The 20% allotment of work that does not have to be assessed by externals should
become a normative aspect of all modules. Whether this is through seminar discussion
requirements or alternative assessment, like the video project described above, these should
be used with great dedication.
My experience with the Fellowship was overwhelmingly positive. It was most likely my most
enjoyable year at Warwick. This was largely due to the professionalism and support of the
centre’s director, Professor Carol Rutter, and its staff.