A Hidden History of Unhappiness

Moran, J ORCID: 0000-0001-9799-0116 A Hidden History of Unhappiness. Critical Quarterly. ISSN 0011-1562 (Accepted)

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Abstract

This essay traces a history of how we have understood acute unhappiness in Britain in the sixty years since the publication of John Berger’s A Fortunate Man (1967). By examining seemingly disparate phenomena – the running down, closure and reuse of mental hospitals, the rise and fall of ‘care in the community’, the contemporary discourse of mental health awareness – I want to explore a shift in attitudes in these years. Berger was already noticing this shift when he wrote A Fortunate Man: a move away from sociological towards individual explanations for mental distress. I explore this shift by discussing public understandings and popular representations of mental health as well as the work of authors such as David Smail, Barbara Taylor, Tom Lee and Horatio Clare. Missing from our understanding of mental suffering, I argue, is a sense of history – of us as mutually entangled beings caught up in a shared skein of meanings and feelings.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	2002 Cultural Studies; 2005 Literary Studies; Education; 4702 Cultural studies; 4705 Literary studies
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HN Social history and conditions. Social problems. Social reform P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) > PN0080 Criticism P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) > PN0441 Literary History
Divisions:	Humanities and Social Science
Publisher:	Wiley
Date of acceptance:	26 June 2026
Date Deposited:	26 Jun 2026 15:21
Last Modified:	26 Jun 2026 15:21
URI:	https://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/28906

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