Insanity in Town Topics
Introduction
Charles Deitz in his study ‘A Tomb for the Living’: An Analysis of Late 19th-Century United States Newspaper Reporting on the Insane Asylum demonstrates the role newspapers play in providing the public with information about mental asylums, the problem of stigmatisation and the shift of mental illness from a private matter into the public sphere, “Mental illness evolved from a private/family concern to one of public import over the course of the 19th century” (v). Town Topics: The Journal of Society, provides therefore an example of a somewhat contradicting phenomena where on one hand the language used adds to stigmatisation and marginalisation of mentally ill people, and on the other hand the marginalization occuring in the public sphere integrates the “lunatics” into everyday life of “normal” people. The main objective of the project is to create a database that includes excerpts from Town Topics: The Journal of Society that revolve around the topic of mental illness.
My primary interest were the following questions:
1. How is mental illness depicted in gossip
2. What is the sentiment towards mental illness
3. Does the sentiment vary in relation to the gender of the person that is gossiped about?
For this purpose, I created categories that are attached to the items uploaded to this database, such as sentiment, gender and people involved. This helps in creating an overview of the general attitudes present in the excerpts. The tags of the items include the keywords of the text in order to simplify searching through the relevant topics. The material was gathered by searching the volumes of the magazine using terms that were common to describe mental health-related issues at the time of its publication. Those terms include, amongst others, neurasthenia, mental aberration, insanity, nervous prostration, rest cure, shell shock, and suicide.
You can find my database by clicking on this button:
Statement on Language:
The language used in Town Topics: The Journal of Society represents the medical and societal standards of the time of its publication. Please do not replicate the vocabulary present in the excerpts as well as in the title of this page outside of its historical context. For further information on the language used in this project, please look under Terminology
All content for educational purposes only.
University of Greifswald
Seminar: Editing Scandal
(Summer Semester 2025)
Instructor: Prof. Dr. Katrin Horn