Digital hermeneutics: scaled readings of online depression discourses

When it comes to understanding experiences of illness, humanities and social sciences research have traditionally reserved a prominent role for narrative. Yet, depression has characteristics that withstand the form of traditional narratives, such as a lack of desire and an impotence to act. How can a 'datafied' approach to online forms of depression writing pose a valuable addition to existing narrative approaches in health humanities? In this article, we analyse lay people's depression discourses online. Our approach, 'digital hermeneutics', is inspired by Gadamer's dialogical hermeneutics. It consists of a 'scaled reading' on five different scales: platform hermeneutics; contextual reading with term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF); distant reading with natural language processing topic modelling; hyper-reading with concordance views and close reading. Our corpus consisted of three data sets, from the blogs and message boards of, respectively, time-to-change.org.uk, a UK-based social organisation and movement that aims to counter mental health discrimination and alleviate social isolation by spreading awareness; Sane.org.uk, a leading UK mental health charity that seeks to help people in facing the challenges of mental illness and to improve quality of life; and the subreddit 'r/depression' on web discussion platform reddit. We found that the manner in which people express experiences of illness online is very much dependent on the specific affordances of platforms. We found degrees of 'narrativity' to be correlated to authorship and identity markers: the less 'anonymous' the writing, generally speaking, the more conventionally 'narrative' it was. Pseudonimity was related to more intimate and singular forms, with less pressure to conform to socially accepted and positive narratives of the 'restitution' type. We also found that interactive affordances of the platforms were used to a limited extent, nuancing assumptions about the polyvocality of online depression writing. We conclude by making a claim for increased cooperation between digital and medical humanities that might lead to a field of 'Digital Medical Humanities'.

Gut feelings: depression as an embodied and affective phenomenon in Houellebecq's Serotonin

Current debates about the possible causes of depression reinforce the age-old body-mind dualism: while some claim that depression is caused by psychological or societal stress, others underline that it results from a shortage of the neurotransmitter serotonin in the central nervous system. This paper shows that Michel Houellebecq's latest novel Serotonin can be read as an account of depression that goes beyond this body-mind dualism. Moreover, we will argue that his way of narrating invites us to reconsider the restorative power of narrative in 'pathography,' a genre that is a primary focus within medical humanities. The first section of the paper discusses, while drawing on Wilson's work on new materialism, that although the title of the novel Serotonin may suggest that Houellebecq takes sides with those who believe that depression is a brain disease, the protagonist of the novel suffers mainly from his gut feelings, which affects his entire embodied existence. Against the background of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy, the second section specifies this existential disruption in terms of an embodied 'I cannot.' In the third section, we make clear how Houellebecq's way of narrating-plotless and episodic-reinforces these embodied feelings of incapacity. The final section, then, traces how Houellebecq, by means of his style of writing and his choice of themes, succeeds in transferring gut feelings onto the reader. If illness narratives aim at sharing experiences of illness, the 'narrative' of depression, so we argue, had better take the form of an anti-narrative or a chaos story. Indeed, Houellebecq's anti-narrative succeeds in passing on to the reader the experience of a debilitating gut feeling, and a gradual loss of grip that manifests itself as a temporal and spatial disorientation.