ENGL4434 · English
Morrissey College of Arts & Sciences
Topics in CNF: Writing Mental Health:"Much madness is divinest sense/to a discerning eye" so begins one of Emily Dickinson's most famous poems. How do writers treat mental health as a subject? What are the issues and questions that arise when contemplating such a large and complex area? In this workshop students will write their own essays in a variety of non-fiction styles (reportage, opinion, profile, narrative, memoir) to address issues of mental health such as mental illness, addiction, neurology and neuropsychology, behavior, and medical history. We'll read short works from a wide selection of writers across disciplines that may include: TaNehisi Coates, Oliver Sacks, Elizabeth Wurtzel, William Styron, Mary Karr, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Alice Miller, Leslie Jamison, and poems of Theodore Roethke, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, documentary, and photographic work of Dior Vargas.
Course experience
Averages use the original five-point historical evaluation scale.
Organization
4.1 / 5
How well the course was organized
Challenge
4.9 / 5
How intellectually challenging students found it
Attendance
4.8 / 5
How necessary attendance was
Assignments
4.9 / 5
How helpful assignments were
Weekly effort
~5
hours per week
Estimated from the original workload response buckets. Individual sections may differ.
Instructor options
Ratings below reflect only recovered evaluations connected to this course.
Across time
Section-level results available in the recovered archive.
Spring 2025
1 sectionSpring 2023
1 section