#PROJECT AHO FREEDOM OF CHOICE SERIES#

In a way, it normalises and re-familiarises the depressive episode as an experience, and while illuminating medical language, it can facilitate a better understanding of oneвЂ™s experience.

#PROJECT AHO FREEDOM OF CHOICE SERIES#

In looking for causal relations and explanations and thus answering the question вЂwhy me?вЂ™, narrative can indeed help the subject of illness trace a single self throughout a series of discontinuous and often disruptive events. This manner of presentation has received a lot of attention in medical humanities research. HouellebecqвЂ™s particular mode of pathography seems to resist вЂnarrative,вЂ™ when we take this to refer to accounts that take the form of a story, that order events in time (with a beginning, middle and end structure), and involve changes over time that affect a subject or a protagonist. However, when we look closely at the presentation of the depressive experiences of its protagonists, we see characteristics that problematise a straightforward categorisation as fictional illness narrative.

At first sight, HouellebecqвЂ™s novel can therefore be seen as a fictional illness narrative, which gives voice to a personвЂ™s lived experiences from a first personвЂ™s perspective. Moreover, we will entertain the possibility that HouellebecqвЂ™s style of writing depression, as well as his thematic choice, evokes fellow feelings of disorientation and dislocation in the reader. 1 Informed by theories from new materialism and phenomenology, we will read depression in Serotonin as an embodied and affective phenomenon. In this paper, we will show that Michel HouellebecqвЂ™s latest novel Serotonin can be read as an account of depression that goes beyond this bodyвЂ“mind dualism.

These debates reinforce an age-old mindвЂ“body dualism, for indeed, they suggest that the cause of the depression should be sought either in some bodily (neurological) defect or in ill-working psychological capacities. Whereas 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. Indeed, its psychotherapeutic and biological methods of treatment, as well as its aetiology and pathogenesis, are subject to ongoing debate. Depression has a heterogeneous clinical picture, meaning that the process and the response to treatment differ from patient to patient.

Yet, when it comes to knowledge and insight into its nature and causes, much remains unclear. According to the WHO, 300 million people suffer from it at one point in their lives. Depression is an urgent public health problem of our time.

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