Co-leaders: Dr. John Getz, Professor Emeritus, Department of English, Xavier University, and Dr. Kathleen Hart, Chair, Professor, School of Psychology, Xavier University.

On the first day of Mental Health Awareness Month, we’ll discuss the ways four literary works portray threats to mental health and ways to sustain it. Although Harriet Beecher Stowe might not have articulated it, she needed mental healing as much as physical when she spent 1846 taking the “water cure” in Brattleboro, VT. We’ll discuss the character of Cassy in a chapter from Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Gloria Steinem’s moving essay about her mother, mental illness, and her family’s failure to understand it; and short poems of survival and peace by Wendell Berry and Maya Angelou.