Category Archives: History of Mental Health

Psychiatry and the Evolution of Mental Health in American Comedy I’ve been dealing with stuff more severe than that since a really young age. Um, I didn’t… I didn’t know when I was 11 years old that this thing had a name: Depression. I just thought everybody in fifth grade had an internal monologue like […]

In what now feels like looking for needles in a comedic haystack, I’ve been trying to find older comedic works that in some way engage with mental health, in either a funny or serious light. I’m also trying to primarily find older works, because for my project, I want to see an evolution of portrayals, […]

Proposal Perhaps one of the most often discussed health topics in recent years has been that of mental health. As society careens forward into the digital age, there has been an increased focus on the upkeep of one’s mental health, and as a result, there has been an increasing turn towards openness in communicating issues […]

As I’ve started to dig back trying to find old comedians talking about mental health, I found it quite challenging to find anything, because as it turns out, they really didn’t talk about it. I’ve come to learn that we live in the Golden Age of comedians talking about how sad they are (which in […]

This was quite tricky to find a lot of good scholarly information on. There aren’t a lot of good monographs on this, and what exists seems to scarcely touch on how mental health has been seen through the comedic lens, so it would seem I’d have a lot of legwork to do if I keep […]

Okay, so bear with me. As someone who’s tried their hand at comedy (to varying degrees of success), and someone who enjoys history, I’ve long been fascinated with the development of humor and satire in the United States. I’ve been trying to figure out how to sneak this casual fascination into a class/scholarly pursuit for […]

Hey there! My name is Ricky Munoz, doing my legally required introduction for this class. I’m a senior history major from Centreville, Virginia, cleaning up a few classes to graduate this semester (is the plan, at least). As many of us alluded to on Tuesday, I’m taking this class not only because it fit well […]