Having It Out with Melancholy

When a friend suggests in the poem that Kenyon “wouldn’t be so depressed / if you really believed in God” (Lines 28-29), the friend inadvertently echoes the lack of understanding and negative perceptions about mental illness in late-20th-century America.

Although the wave of new pharmaceutical drugs introduced between the 1950s and 1980s created new treatments for patients, the public still lacked insight into the nature of mental illnesses. The public’s resources often painted people with mental illnesses as dangerous, unreliable, lazy, amoral, or weak-willed. In a study about Americans’ perceptions about mental illness, researchers found that almost 80% of participants dismissed major depression as the result of “the ups and downs of life” (Pescosolido, Bernice A., et al. “Trends in Public Stigma of Mental Illness in the US, 1996-2018.” JAMA Network Open, vol. 4, no. 12, 2021). People also trivialized and shamed others with mental illnesses. As a result, depression went underdiagnosed and untreated well into the 1990s (Leary, Warren. “Doctors Urged to Look for Signs of Depression.” The New York Times, 21 Apr. 1993).

Kenyon deconstructs these arguments throughout “Having It Out with Melancholy”: “I’m trying to explain to people who have never experienced this kind of desolation, what it is.