This dissertation tracks the ways that depressive disorder is given meaning across a range of communities in Seattle, Washington. I show how, alongside the use of antidepressant drugs, narratives of depression and desires built into the city of Seattle converge as key practices in sustaining the promises of American nationalism and science—desires that I show are deeply coded for class, race, and gender in both clinical practice and in spatial imaginaries of the city itself. I argue that depression functions as a multi-accented narrative that operates on the boundary between clinical institutions and encounters, the organization of public space in Seattle, and in relationship to longstanding national hopes and promises. Thus, I track the displacements—or fugues—of depression as they emerge across Seattle and connect otherwise disconnected institutions, individuals, and spaces. These displacements of depression become visible as variations on a set of narrative tropes embedded in postwar white, middle-class fantasy; and as means mapping spatial relations in Seattle through community mental health centers, advocacy groups, and the individuals they serve.

The city of Seattle and antidepressant drugs both emerged as powerful symbols in US national consciousness in the 1990s, each offering a new set of solutions to the shortcomings of the national promise of the "good life." Antidepressant drugs and psychiatry tapped a deeply embedded American postwar faith in the ability of science to secure progress and citizens' happiness. Similarly, Seattle become one of, if not the, central example of the possibilities for reinvigorating healthy and safe forms of American urbanism—one that mitigated long-standing American anxieties about the dangers of cities through Seattle's unique relationship to its surrounding natural areas, and that articulated Seattle to a sense of national promise. In contrast, however, to these booster images of both the city and the success of new psychotropic medications, this dissertation tracks the anxiety and failures that narratives of Seattle, psychiatry, and national progress narratives attempt to hold at bay—in particular, the forms of race and class containment buried in both psychiatry and stories of the city. I do so by tracing one of the key institutions of the postwar period: community mental health centers; their class and race displacements throughout the city; the forms of cultural citizenship and historical memory that they either make possible or repress; and the ways that advocacy groups attempt to intervene in or contest normative psychiatric assumptions and the kinds of minds and bodies they construct.