Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Anxiously Awaiting: A Novella, Alexander Bartlow

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

Throughout my childhood and secondary education growing up in rural Indiana, I found that, in a town of less than 2,000 people, mental illness and teenage suicide were all too common. Upon researching the sad state of mental healthcare in rural America, I felt obliged to bring light in my Honors thesis to the overlooked and under-treated thoughts that plague the minds of adolescents experiencing depression, anxiety, and suicidal contemplation. In this fiction novella, I follow the life of Lincoln Phillips, a 14-year-old boy who lives with anxiety in an unchanging, inescapable town that stigmatizes mental illness. He experiences the …