Women and Depression: Recovery and Resistance Book

Acknowledgements xi

1 Introduction: studying women's experiences of recovery from depression 1

Recovery from depression: a neglected topic of inquiry 2

Research on recovery 6

The research projects 7

Chapter outline 10

Terminological troubles: a final word on words 12

2 Narratives of depression 14

Traumatic and chronic experiences: violence by men against women and women's experiences of poverty 16

Interpersonal relationships 21

Women's everyday lives: marriage, motherhood, and martyrdom 25

The dismissal of women's distress 43

The medicalization of women's misery 53

Assumptions of biomedicine: when objective science fails subjective experience 57

Silencing the self, masking the pain 63

Conclusion 65

3 Recovery from depression 67

Narratives of recovery through medical remedy 68

Narratives of personal transformation: recovery as resistance of the 'good' woman identity 85

Conclusion 106

4 Struggling to self-care: the material and discursive context of women's health practices 109

Terminological troubles - revisited 113

Constraints to women's self-care: a material-discursive analysis 114

Talking about self-care: endorsing and accommodating discourses of femininity 129

Talking about self-care: resisting and transcending discourses of femininity 158

Conclusion 172

5 Conclusion: implications for usefulness 174

The value in attending to stories of recovery and well-being 179

Deconstructing bio-power: the need for alternative understandings of pain, distress, and dis-ease 181

The 'good' woman is alive and unwell: the need for deconstruction and resistance of discourses of femininity185

Understanding women's struggle to self-care 191

Conclusion 193

Appendix A A brief discussion of epistemology, social constructionism, and discourse 195

Appendix B Additional information about the research participants and interview process 204

Appendix C Transcript notation 206

References 208

Index 230