Literature & Madness

Description: Hello! This group is devoted to literary works in which mental illness plays a part. (Think less self-help instruction and more along the lines of literary portrayals of madness.) Discussion of memoirs and (auto)biographies in which mental illness/recovery plays a significant part is welcomed as well.

Here's a list of works, by no means exhaustive, that represent the gist of this group:

The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Black Sun - Julia Kristeva
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
Darkness Visible - William Styron
Girl, Interrupted - Susanna Kaysen
The Hours - Michael Cunningham
Night Geometry and The Garscadden Trains - A.L. Kennedy
The Noonday Demon - Andrew Solomon
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey
Prozac Nation - Elizabeth Wurtzel
Undercurrents: A Life Beneath the Surface - Martha Manning
An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness - Kay Redfield Jamison
The Virgin Suicides - Jeffrey Eugenides
Welcome to My Country - Lauren Slater
Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys
The Yellow Wallpaper - Charlotte Gilman Perkins
Manic - Terri Cheney
Madness: A Bipolar Life - Marya Hornbacher
Prozac Diary - Lauren Slater

more tweaking to come...