The section ‘Literature, Storytelling, Movies, and Mental Illness’ deals with the role of literature, storytelling, and film for therapy and the representation of mental disorders. Four articles treat the written or spoken word and five articles discuss the medium of film. Mental disorders and their treatment, psychotherapists, psychologists, and psychiatrists are not only to be found in the real world of medicine, but also in the world of fiction. If and what there is to learn from these literary and cinematic representations is addressed in the articles in this section, as is the criticism of the fictional representation of psychiatry and psychotherapy. Arts scholars and researchers from the field of medical humanities are not infrequently convinced that artistic and fictional representations are sometimes even closer to the truth of inner life than abstract nomenclatures and diagnostic categories of the soul that are detached from real-life contexts. As important and beneficial as it is that we have diagnostic manuals such as ICD-11 and DSM-5, which are indispensable for collegial communication, epidemiological research and empirical therapy studies, they are anaemic and poor in visualization when it comes to the phenomenological, in-depth hermeneutic and holistic understanding of disorders. To put it more pointedly, one could say that the mentioned manuals capture the skeletal dimension of mental disorders, while the fictional media of film and literature are capable of depicting the whole, physical human being in flesh and blood.
It remains to be seen whether the diagnostic criteria for bipolar I disorder, as found in the European and American Manual of Mental Disorders, really illustrate the phenomenon of the pathological rejoicing-to-high-heaven and plunging-to-depths-of-despair. Where these mood swings and the ensuing, partly serious turbulences of the lifeworld, including attempted suicide and psychosis are brought to life is, for example, in the film Mr. Jones (1993) or in Thomas Melle’s novel The World at My Back (2023). For lectures on psychopathology, such world explorations provided by film and literature are indispensable if students of psychology, psychotherapy, and psychiatry are to recognize this disorder in reality at some point. At this point, we can only agree with Virginia Woolf, who once said: ‘There is more truth in fiction than facts, … (1977, 6).’ In addition, not every patient and not every psychotherapist, who may be good patients and good psychotherapists, can speak and write in such a way that it becomes evident, tangible, and vivid what they are talking about when they report on disorders or treatments. Perhaps Stefan Zweig’s Mental Healers (2012) and the film Good Will Hunting (1997) are more likely to teach us about the essence of psychotherapy than a dry and austere textbook, which may be accurately written, but has little power to open up the world. Similarly, not every artist is able to talk about their work of art in an enlightening and illuminating way and not every psychopathologist is able to talk about their field of research with great phenomenological explicative power, nor is able to grasp and interpret it in its full depth. Not to mention patients, who are often left speechless, silent, and petrified by their disorder anyway and who cannot be expected to provide profound information about what it is that actually troubles them psychologically. We must let artists, poets, and filmmakers help us when it comes to understanding the life of the soul and its disorder, because artists and poets are characterized precisely by the fact that they are able to express and visualize even the most inconspicuous things in a clear and precise manner.
This section, therefore, features articles on the representation of mental disorders and psychotherapy in literature and film, on the book and the film as a therapeutic medium, on the subject of storytelling, on the power of the spoken word, as well as articles on the topic of filmmakers with lived experiences and on the cinematic representation of emotions in childhood.
In the context of this publication, a further step has thus been taken to make the world of fiction fruitful for therapeutic concerns and complement the currently justifiable booming orientation of the therapeutic towards evidence-based psychotherapy with aesthetic-based psychotherapy. In the latter, art and the humanities, and above all what has long been known as the medical humanities and health humanities, play a decisive role. The idea is not only to include philosophy, religion, music, literature, art etc. in psychotherapy or to reflect on the significance of these disciplines, which are classified as humanities for psychotherapy, but also to understand the current practice of psychotherapy from its history and to pose relevant epistemological, humanistic, and medical ethical questions in order to ultimately fertilize this practice. The same applies to psychopathology.
In addition to such wonderful works as The Oxford Handbook of Phenomenological Psychopathology (Stanghellini et al., 2019), which represents a milestone in phenomenological endeavours in the field of psychopathology, this field could be supplemented precisely by letting poets, filmmakers, and artists who are experts by experience tell and show us what suicidality, psychosis, intoxication, ecstasy, and addiction, among others, are. We can study intoxication, ecstasy, and addiction phenomenologically and measure them empirically. However, we can also let the great writers and experts on intoxication and their literary power of explication help us to understand what kind of phenomena we are actually dealing with (cf. Resch, 2009).
In addition to the topics dealt with in this section, which only represent a small selection from the inexhaustible cosmos of contributions relevant to the humanities, it would be highly desirable for our publication as a whole, and the following section in particular, to inspire further research into the field of literature, storytelling, movies, and mental illness.
The Oxford Handbook of Mental Health and Contemporary Western Aesthetics
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