At the Limits of Materiality / At the Limits of Discourse: Feminist Struggles to Make Sense of Depression in Women

Abstract

Depression presents feminist theorists with a significant problem: it makes sense to many of us to point out the ways that depression, as a concept, is constituted discursively. In particular, depression seems indelibly tied to powerful biomedical discourses, and also, for women, to the equally powerful discourses that dictate what a "good woman" should be. Yet to highlight these discursive dimensions of the phenomenon seems to preclude both an acknowledgement of depression as a source of pain and an acceptance of any form of treatment for this condition other than dramatic social change. This article explores the limitations of strictly material and strictly discursive explanations for women's depression, and suggests that a feminist model existing in-between these two dualities is essential to a more comprehensive understanding of women's depression experiences. The narratives of women who experience depression provide a rich source of knowledge by which to deconstruct materialist and discursive approaches to women's depression. A narrative approach also allows us to escape the confines of scientific/positivist research, which has proven inadequate to fully encapsulate the phenomenon of depression in women. The article concludes with an evaluation of the material-discursive models for understanding women's depression recently posed by feminist
psychologists Janet M. Stoppard and Jane Ussher.