1. VOICE OF THE DRUG: INTERPRETING MEDICALIZED DISEMPOWERMENT IN WOMEN’S NARRATIVES OF DEPRESSION
- Author
-
Hoogen, Siri Rebecca
- Subjects
- medicalization, feminist, qualitative, depression, antidepressant
- Abstract
This paper presents a qualitative investigation of the phenomenon of medicalization in women’s narratives of depression. Feminist research ethics informed the research and creative process, including the recruitment and interviewing of the women participants, the analysis of their narratives, and the construction of the creative-nonfiction representations of their stories. Four personal narratives were analyzed for the role medicalization played in women’s understanding of their depression and for the possibilities of disempowerment in a medicalized understanding. Each narrative is presented as a story and shows the tension between the medicalized understanding of depression, which is argued to be our cultural master narrative; a personal sense-making of depression, which is how women fit the experience into the context of their lives; and a feminist analysis of structures of disempowerment in women’s lives. A discussion of the ramifications of these analyses follows, with a suggestion for future direction in this area and methodology.
- Published
- 2006