Black dogs and blue words: Depression and gender in the age of self-care

Black Dogs and Blue Words: Depression and Gender in the Age of Self-Care

Volumn , Issue , 2010, Pages 1-213

  Emmons, Kimberly K ^a  

^a CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 84896212121     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
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References (298)

1. Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression (New York: Scribner, 2001), 300 (emphasis added).
2. The gender of this "patient" is important: as Allan Horwitz comments, a "culture of mental health... is now the everyday reality of daytime talk shows, television series, popular magazines for girls and women (and sometimes men), and virtually all advice columnists" (Creating Mental Illness [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002], 4). This relatively recent and gendered culture of mental health, Horwitz points out, is particularly evident in media directed at girls and women. In addition, women are more likely to search for health information online. According to the Health on the Net Foundation, 72 percent of patients in the United States who responded to a recent Internet usage survey were women.
3. Amy Harmon, "Young, Assured and Playing Pharmacists to Friends", New York Times, November 16, 2005.
4. Throughout this book, I will be using brand names for a variety of antidepressant medications. Trademarks for each of these brand names are registered by the manufacturers. For convenience, I list the manufacturer, brand and generic names, and FDA approval date here: Eli Lilly's Prozac (fluoxetine hydrochloride), approved by the U. S. Food and Drug Administration in 1987;
5. See, for example, Peter Conrad, The Medicalization of Society: On the Transformation of Human Conditions into Treatable Disorders (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).
6. David Healey, "Good Science or Good Business?" in Prozac as a Way of Life, ed. Carl Elliott and Tod Chambers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 77.
7. Allan V. Horwitz, Jerome C. Wakefield, and Robert L. Spitzer, The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 4.
8. For example, see David Healy, Let Them Eat Prozac (New York: NYU Press, 2004);
9. Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels, Selling Sickness (New York: Nation Books, 2005);
10. Peter Kramer, Against Depression (New York: Viking, 2005). One exception is Jonathan
11. Metzl's Prozac on the Couch (Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 2003)
12. William Styron, Darkness Visible (New York: Random House, 1990), 37.
13. Irving Kirsch, Brett J. Deacon, Tania B. Huedo-Medina, Alan Scoboria, Thomas J. Moore, and Blair T. Johnson, "Initial Severity and Antidepressant Benefits: A Meta-Analaysis of Data Submitted to the Food and Drug Administration", PLoS Medicine 5, no. 2 (2008). Available: http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=getdocument&doi=10.1371/ journal.pmed.0050045&ct=1 op. Accessed: March 1, 2008.
14. CES-D threshold scores (11-29 indicate mild to moderate symptoms) were derived from Marie-Annette Brown and Jo Robinson, When Your Body Gets the Blues (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2002), 177;
15. Myrna M. Weissman et al., "Assessing Depressive Symptoms in Five Psychiatric Populations: A Validation Study", American Journal of Epidemiology 106, no. 3(1977):203-213;
16. H. C. Schulberg et al., "Assessing Depression in Primary Medical and Psychiatric Practices", Archives of General Psychiatry 42, no. 12 (1985) 1164-1170.
17. Gay Eade and Julie Bradshaw, "Understanding Discourses of the Worried Well", Australian and New Zealand Journal of Mental Health Nursing 4 (1995) 61-69.
18. For more on ethnographic interviewing, see James P. Spradley, The Ethnographic Interview (Fort Worth, Tex.: Harcourt College Publishers, 1979);
19. Elliot G. Mishler, Research Interviewing: Context and Narrative (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986);
20. Ruthellen Josselson, ed., Ethics and Process in the Narrative Study of Lives (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1996).
21. See Healy, Let Them Eat Prozac, for a description of the counterdiscourses, including critiques of the pharmaceutical industry for withholding information.
22. As Judy Z. Segal explains, this is a common use of what classical rhetoric calls epideictic rhetoric. See her Health and the Rhetoric of Medicine (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005).
23. See, for example, Dana Crowley Jack, Silencing the Self (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991);
24. Nell Casey, Unholy Ghost (New York: William Morrow, 2001).
25. For a review of the "he/man" debate, see Wendy Martyna, "Beyond the 'He/Man' Approach: The Case for Nonsexist Language", Signs 5, no. 3(Spring 1980):482-493. Critics of the feminist movement suggested that such changes were unnecessary because they were simply cosmetic, or were forms of "political correctness" in its pejorative meaning.
26. See Deborah Cameron, Verbal Hygiene (New York: Routledge, 1995), especially chapter 4, for a nuanced reading of the political correctness movement.
27. Laura D. Hirschbein, "Science, Gender, and the Emergence of Depression in American Psychiatry, 1952-1980", Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 61, no. 2 (2006) 202.
28. For a more complete articulation of the argument that diseases have been created, see Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels, Selling Sickness (New York: Nation Books, 2005);
29. David Healy, Let Them Eat Prozac (New York: NYU Press, 2004);
30. Allan V. Horwitz, Jerome C. Wakefield, and Robert L. Spitzer, The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
31. Andrew Lakoff, Pharmaceutical Reason: Knowledge and Value in Global Psychiatry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 7.
32. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage Books, 1988).
33. Lilie Chouliaraki and Norman Fairclough, Discourse in Late Modernity: Rethinking Critical Discourse Analysis (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 4.
34. Lawrence Rubin, "Psychotropia: Medicine, Media, and the Virtual Asylum", Journal of Popular Culture 39, no. 2 (2006) 262.
35. See also David Healy, The Antidepressant Era (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997);
36. Charles Barber, Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating a Nation (New York: Pantheon Books, 2008);
37. Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels, Selling Sickness (New York: Nation Books, 2005).
38. John M. Grahol, "An Introduction to Depression", Psych Central, Dec. 6, 2006. Available: . Accessed: June 20, 2007.
39. Carl Elliott and Todd Chambers, eds., Prozac as a Way of Life (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 4.
40. Lauren Slater, Prozac Diary (New York: Penguin Books, 1998);
41. Persimmon Blackbridge, Prozac Highway (New York: Marion Boyars, 1997);
42. Peter Kramer, Listening to Prozac (New York: Penguin Books, 1993);
43. Jonathan Metzl, Prozac on the Couch (Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 2003);
44. Joseph Glenmullen, Prozac Backlash (New York: Touchstone, 2000).
45. Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation: A Memoir (Boston/New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994), 302-303.
46. Martha Manning, Undercurrents: A Life beneath the Surface (San Francisco: Harper, 1995), 165.
47. Carl Elliot, Better than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003).
48. Lewis Wolpert, Malignant Sadness: The Anatomy of Depression (New York: Free Press, 1999), 176.
49. see Stuart A. Kirk and Herb Kutchins, The Selling of DSM: The Rhetoric of Science in Psychiatry (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1992);
50. Herb Kutchins and Stuart A. Kirk, Making Us Crazy DSM: The Psychiatric Bible and the Creation of Mental Disorders (New York: Free Press, 1997);
51. Shorter, A History of Psychiatry (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1997), esp. 298-305.
52. Robert L. Spitzer, "Foreword", in Horwitz et al. The Loss of Sadness, vii.
53. Gerald L. Klerman, "The Contemporary American Scene", in Sources and Traditions of Classification in Psychiatry, ed. Norman Sartorius et al. (Toronto: Hogrefe and Huber, 1990), 94.
54. American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual: Mental Disorders (DSM-I) (Washington, D. C.: American Psychiatric Association, 1952), v.
55. John Frederick Reynolds, David C. Mair, and Pamela C. Fisher, Writing and Reading Mental Health Records: Issues and Analysis (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1992), 67.
56. American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: Third Ed. (DSM-III) (Washington, D. C.: American Psychiatric Association, 1980), 2.
57. American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: Third Ed. Rev. (DSM-III-R) (Washington, D. C.: American Psychiatric Association, 1987), xxvi.
58. American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: Fourth Ed. Text Rev. (DSM-IV-TR) (Washington, D. C.: American Psychiatric Association, 2000), 8.
59. David Karp, Speaking of Sadness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 14.
60. Jennifer Radden, ed., The Nature of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 44.
61. Stanley Jackson, Melancholia and Depression: From Hippocratic Times to Modern Times (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 404.
62. National Institute of Mental Health, Depression: What Every Woman Should Know (Bethesda, Md.: National Institutes of Health, U. S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2006) (NIH Publication No. 05-4779).
63. John P. Hewitt, Michael R. Fraser, and Leslie Beth Berger, "Is It Me or Is It Prozac? Antidepressants and the Construction of the Self", in Pathology and the Postmodern, ed. Dwight Fee (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2000), 179.
64. Peter Kramer, Against Depression (New York: Viking, 2005), 4.
65. Justine Coupland and Richard Gwyn, eds., Discourse, the Body, and Identity (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 4.
66. Kenneth J. Gergen, The Saturated Self: Dilemma of Identity in Contemporary Life (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 14-15.
67. For an analysis and history of advice directed at women, see Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts' Advice to Women (1978; New York: Anchor Books, 1989).
68. World Health Organization, "Gender" (2008). Available: http://www.who.int/topics/gender/en/. Accessed: March 1, 2008.
69. Michael C. Miller, "Stop Pretending Nothing's Wrong", Newsweek 141, no. 24(June 16, 2003):71.
70. Meri Nana-Ama Danquah, Willow Weep for Me (New York: One World/Ballantine, 1999), 21.
71. John Langone, "Quiet Demons in Black Life", New York Times, 7 December 2003, F7.
72. The 1990 APA Taskforce on Women and Depression is a good indicator of the attention paid specifically to women's depression. See Ellen McGrath and Gwendolyn Puryear Keita, eds., Women and Depression: Risk Factors and Treatment Issues (Washington, D. C.: American Psychological Association, 1990).
73. National Institute of Mental Health, Women Hold Up Half the Sky (2000). Available: http://www.nimh.nih.gov/publicat/womensoms.cfm.
74. World Health Organization, The Global Burden of Disease (2000). Available: http://ww.who.int/msa/mnh/ems/dalys/intro.htm.
75. Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, Sex Differences in Depression (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993), 6.
76. See, for example, Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness (New York: Avon Books, 1972).
77. McGrath's book is less interested in social influences on depression than Chesler's-aside from suggesting that societal pressures on women (to be young, to be thin, to be beautiful) exist. McGrath's discussion of "Healthy Depression" focuses on the ways that individuals should learn to cope with these expectations. When Feeling Bad Is Good (New York: Henry Holt, 1992) is an interesting artifact both for the ways that it tries to demarcate the boundaries of illness and for the ways it reasserts appropriate subjectivities.
78. A similar elision of fathers is present in Andrew Solomon's Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression (New York: Sailres, 2001). He writes: "To improve the mental health of children, it is sometimes more important to treat the mother than to treat the children directly; to try to change negative familial patterns to incorporate flexibility, hardiness, cohesion, and problem-solving ability.... Children of depressed mothers have more difficulties in the world than do children of schizophrenic mothers: depression has a singularly immediate effect on the basic mechanisms of parenting" (181, emphasis added). Additional examples can be found in
79. Linda M. Blum and Nena F. Stracuzzi, "Gender in the Prozac Nation: Popular Discourse and Productive Femininity", Gender and Society 18, no. 3(June 2004):269-286.
80. National Institute of Mental Health, Depression (Bethesda, Md.: National Institutes of Health, U. S. Department Health and Human Services, 2000) (NIH Publication No. 00-3561).
81. NIMH, Depression: What Every Woman Should Know, np.
82. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd online edition.
83. United States Government Accountability Office, Prescription Drugs: Improvements Needed in FDA's Oversight of Direct-to-Consumer Advertising (Publication No. GAO-07-54) (Washington, D. C.: U. S. Government Accountability Office), November 2006. Available: http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d0754.pdf. Accessed: March 1, 2008.
84. For an analysis of traditional medical expertise, see Howard Waitzkin, The Politics of Medical Encounters: How Patients and Doctors Deal with Social Problems (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993);
85. for additional discussion on the discourses of medicine, see Eliot G. Mishler, The Discourse of Medicine: Dialectics of Medical Interviews (Norwood, N. J.: Ablex, 1984).
86. It is not the purpose of this text to debate the clinical findings supporting the use of antidepressant drug therapies. For more detailed analyses of these findings, see, for example, David Healy, Let Them Eat Prozac (New York: NYU Press, 2004);
87. Jonathan Metzl, Prozac on the Couch (Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 2003);
88. Joseph Glenullen, Prozac Backlash (New York: Touchstone, 2000);
89. Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels, Selling Sickness (New York: Nation Books, 2005). I concede from the outset that these drugs do a lot of good for a lot of people. My concern, however, is with the rhetoric that surrounds the drugs and their uses, which fundamentally shapes our notions of health and illness. Individuals come to understand their experiences as constituting depression and as requiring medication through the language that surrounds them.
90. The collection Prozac as a Way of Life (ed. Carl Eliot and Todd Chambers [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004])
91. draws together a variety of scholars to examine the effects of Prozac on social life. Some argue that it serves as an "enhancement technology" or a tool for self-creation rather than a necessary medical intervention. Indeed, some of the authors in that collection take Prozac and its marketing to be an important development on the road to drugs such as Viagra. One of the most vocal supporters of Prozac as a necessary medical intervention has been Peter Kramer, Listening to Prozac (New York: Penguin Books, 1993)
92. Against Depression (New York: Viking, 2005).
93. For a history of psychiatry, an excellent and concise overview is Edward Shorter, A History of Psychiatry, (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1997).
94. (Writing and Reading Mental Health Records [Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1992]).
95. A variety of excellent histories of depression provide context for my arguments here, but none addresses the language of depression specifically. In Prozac on the Couch, Metzl argues that contemporary biological psychiatry reinscribes psychoanalytic categories;
96. Jennifer Radden, The Nature of Melancholy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000)
97. Stanley Jackson, Melancholia and Depression: From Hippocratic Times to Modern Times (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), remains the most cited comprehensive source for a history of depression;
98. Christopher M. Calahan and German E. Berrios, Reinventing Depression: A History of the Treatment of Depression in Primary Care, 1940-2004 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004)
99. World Health Organization, "Depression" (2008). Available: http://www.who.int/mental-health/management/depression/definition/en/Accessed: March 1, 2008.
100. Andrew Lakoff, Pharmaceutical Reason: Knowledge and Value in Global Psychiatry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 7.
101. In this sentiment, Kramer echoes (and cites) Susan Sontag's classic argument against metaphoric uses of illness. For Sontag, "the most truthful way of regarding illness- and the healthiest way of being ill-is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking" (Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors [1978; New York: Anchor Books, 1990], 3).
102. Lewis Wolpert, Malignant Sadness: The Anatomy of Depression (New York: Free Press, 1999), 76.
103. Nell, Casey, Unholy Ghost (New York: William Mocraw, 2001), 2.
104. In October 2001, this advertisement appeared in Time, Newsweek
105. the New York Times Magazine, among other places. Glaxo-SmithKline was not the only company capitalizing on the fears engendered by the events of September 11, 2001. For example, an October 2001 advertisement transformed Pfizer's Zoloft-for-depression campaign-in which the depressed creature (a cartoon sphere) sits crying under the overhang of a cliff-into a Zoloft-for-anxiety campaign by morphing the cliff into a menacing presence, which looms over the same spherical creature, now shaking with fear. The close connection between anxiety and depression has been documented in the scientific literature as well as in the popular imagination.
106. See, for example, Holly Hazlett-Stevens, Women Who Worry Too Much: How to Stop Worry and Anxiety from Ruining Relationships, Work and Fun (San Francisco: New Harbinger Publications, 2005), for a popular self-help text;
107. Siegfried Kasper, Johan A. Den Boer, and J. M. Ad Sitsen, eds., Handbook of Depression and Anxiety, 2nd ed. (New York: Marcel Dekker, 2003), for an overview of the scientific literature.
108. Michael S. Wilkes, Robert A. Bell, and Richard L. Kravitz, "Direct-to-Consumer Prescription Drug Advertising: Trends, Impact, and Implications", Drug Advertising 19, no. 2 (2000) 115.
109. Michel Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, vol. 1, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997), 225.
110. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 51.
111. See Lois McNay, Foucault and Feminism (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993);
112. Arthur Frank, "Stories of Illness as Care of the Self: A Foucauldian Dialogue", Health 2, no. 3(July 1998):329-348.
113. Judy Z. Segal, Health and the Rhetoric of Medicine, (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005), 158.
114. Emily Martin, Bipolar Expeditions: Mania and Depression in American Culture (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 2007), 134.
115. Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression (New York: Scribner, 2001), 300.
116. Dorothy Smith, Texts, Facts, and Femininity: Exploring the Relations of Ruling (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 192-193.
117. Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self: The History of Sexuality, vol. 3, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1986), 57.
118. Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 37.
119. William H. Gass, "Introduction" Anatomy of Melancholy (New York: New York Review of Books, 2001), ix.
120. Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992), argues for the feminization of depression in Early Modern texts and culture.
121. National Institute of Mental Health, Depression: What Every Woman Should Know (Bethesda, Md: National Institutes of Health, U. S. Department Health and Human Services, 2006) (NIH Publication No. 05-4779).
122. William Styron, Darkness Visible, (New York: Random House, 1990), 36.
123. Lewis Wolpert, Malignant Sadness: The Anatomy of Depression (New York: Free Press, 1999), xii.
124. See, for example, Arthur Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
125. Meri Nana-Ama Danquah, Willow Weep for Me (New York: One World/Ballantine, 1999), 86.
126. Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation: A Memoir (Boston/New York: Houghton Miffin, 1994), 59-60.
127. Martha Manning, Undercurrents: A Life Beneath the Surface (San Francisco: Harper, 1999), 75.
128. In Myrna Weissman and Eugene Paykel's The Depressed Woman: A Study of Social Relationships (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), the authors describe the term depression as having "at least three or four meanings... a mood, a symptom, a syndrome, and, some would maintain, a disease or group of diseases" (1). They wish to discuss depression as a syndrome (disease is eschewed as "more controversial"), and they define syndrome as "borrowed from medicine and refer[ring] to a cluster of symptoms and functional disturbances that usually have a common mechanism but a variety of causes" (4). The term syndrome appears eighteen times in my discourse sample, but only three in reference to depression. Other references include "empty nest syndrome" (Anemona Hartocollis, "Early Pangs of Empty Nest Syndrome When the Children Leave Home for College"
129. New York Times [September 4, 2005]: 34);
130. "mean-girl syndrome" ("Action Strategies", Blues Buster 2, no. 6 [June 2002]: 1-2);
131. "premenstrual syndrome" (e.g., "Dietary Supplement Found to Be Contaminated", New York Times [September 1, 1998]).
132. One reference is masculine inflected: "John Wayne syndrome" (Peg Tyre, "Battling the Effects of War (Cover Story)", Newsweek 144, no. 23 [December 6, 2004]: 68-70.). Others are at least ostensibly gender neutral: "chronic fatigue syndrome"
133. (Pat Wingert et al., "Young and Depressed", Newsweek 140, no. 15 [October 7, 2002]: 52);
134. "carpal tunnel syndrome" (Sarah Kershaw, "Hooked on the Web: Help Is on the Way", New York Times [December 2005]: 1.). Because there are so few references to depression as a syndrome, I have not included it in my analysis. Nevertheless, the stereotypical gender collocations provide further evidence medical attention is directed at women's emotionality (as well as men's physicality).
135. Arthur Kleinman, The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing and the Human Condition (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 4.
136. Christopher Boorse, "On the Distinction between Disease and Illness", Philosophy and Public Affairs 5, no. 1(Autumn 1975):56.
137. These definitions come from the Oxford English Dictionary, online 2nd edition (1989).
138. Peter Kramer Against Depression, (New York: Viking, 2005), xiii.
139. Tracy Thompson, The Beast: A Journey through Depression (New York: Plume, 1996), 189.
140. Yahlin Chang, "Women Behaving Badly", Newsweek 131, no. 14(April 6, 1998):66.
141. "Blacks and the Blues", Blues Buster 3, no. 7(September 2003):1, 4-5.
142. Debra Rosenberg and Matthew Cooper. "Tipper Steps Out (Cover Story)", Newsweek 133, no. 21(May 24, 1999):48.
143. Michael D. Yapko, "Who Gets Depressed?" Blues Buster 2, no. 7(July/August 2002):8.
144. Susan H. Greenberg et al., "The Baby Blues and Beyond", Newsweek 138, no. 1(July 2, 2001):26.
145. William Frosch, "Introduction", in Handbook of Depression and Anxiety, 2nd ed., ed. Siegfried Kasper, Johan A. den Boer, and J. M. Ad Sitsen (New York: Marcel Dekker, Inc., 2003), iii.
146. Genre theorist Anne Freadman sums up the purpose of not-statements in distinguishing between genres: "Starting from the class of all texts, or discourse, the notstatement is the first move establishing a generic classification.... [it] gives this kind of place among other places." "Anyone for Tennis?" in Genre and the New Rhetoric, ed. Aviva Freedman and Peter Medway (London: Taylor and Francis, 1994), 51-52.
147. "101 Facts about Depression", Blues Buster/4, no. 4(May 2004), 1, 4-7.
148. Ellen McGrath, "Action Strategies", Blues Buster 3, no. 2(March 2003):2.
149. "Action Strategies", Blues Buster 3, no. 10(December 2003):1-2.
150. Jeffrey Smith suggests that "it's at least curious, possibly even indicative, that the word we've substituted for 'melancholia' in this century has also become synonymous with our term for a drastic economic downturn. " Where the Roots Reach for Water: A Personal and Natural History of Melancholia (New York: New Point Press, 1999), 110.
151. McGrath, "Action Strategies", Blues Buster (March 2003).
152. Carolyn R. Miller, "Presumptions of Expertise: The Role of Ethos in Risk Analysis", Configurations 11 (2003) 166.
153. Ulrich Beck, "From Industrial Society to the Risk Society: Questions of Survival, Social Structure and Ecological Enlightenment", Theory, Culture and Society 9 (1992) 119.
154. Linda M. Blum and Nena F. Stracuzzi, "Gender in the Prozac Nation: Popular Discourse and Productive Femininity", Gender and Society 18, no. 3(June 2004):271.
155. Michael C. Miller, "Stop Pretending Nothing's Wrong", Newsweek 141, no. 24(June 16, 2003):71.
156. Claudia H. Deutsch, "At Lunch with: Rabbi Benjamin Blech; Making a Fortune, Losing It and Moving On", New York Times, December 7, 2003, 8.
157. Michael C. Miller, "Stop Pretending Nothing's Wrong", Newsweek 141, no. 24(June 16, 2003), 71.
158. Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, Sex Differences in Depression (Stanford Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993), 6.
159. See, for example, Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art (New York: Basic Books, 1964).
160. Stanley Jackson, Melancholia and Depression: From Hippocratic Times to Modern Times (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 396.
161. There are interesting parallels between these notions of color and recent developments in brain imagery. See, for example, Joseph Dumit, Picturing Personhood: Brain Scans and Biomedical Identity (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 2003).
162. See, in particular, Meri Nana-Ama Danquah, Willow Weep for Me (New York: One World/Ballantine), 1999.
163. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
164. Emily Martin, "The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles", Signs 16. 3(Spring 1991):485-501.
165. Barbara Tomlinson, "Phallic Fables and Spermatic Romance: Disciplinary Crossing and Textual Ridicule", Configurations 3, no. 2 (1995) 105-134.
166. Emily Martin, The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), provides a more detailed analysis.
167. Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression (New York: Scribner, 2001), 16.
168. "Crisis on Campus" Blues Buster 2, no. 5(May 2002):1, 4-5.
169. "Love and Depression", Blues Buster 2, no. 11(December 2002):1, 4-5.
170. James Dao, "The 2000 Campaign: The Family; Mrs. Gore Takes Turn on Stump", New York Times, June 1, 2000, 26.
171. Debra Rosenberg, "'My Ambivalence Is Pretty Normal, '" Newsweek 133, no. 21(May 24, 1999):51.
172. Lauren Slater, Prozac Diary (New York: Penguin Books, 1998), 10.
173. Joseph Glenmullen's Prozac Backlash (New York: Touchstone, 2000)
174. Martha Manning, Undercurrents: A life Beneath the Surface (San Francisco: Harper, 1995), 196.
175. William Styron, Darkness Visible (New York: Random House, 1990), 79.
176. Jeffery Smith, Where Roots Reach for Water A Personal and Natural History of Melancholia (New York: New Point Press, 1999), 5.
177. Tracy Thompson, The Beast: A Journey through Depression (New York: Plume, 1996), 4.
178. Michael D. Yapko, "Five Years Old and Already Blue", Blues Buster 4, no. 1(January/February 2004):8.
179. Nell Casey, ed., Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression (New York: William Morrow, 2001), 247.
180. Jeffrey P. Lacasse and Jonathan Leo, "Serotonin and Depression", PLoS Medicine v2, no. 12 (2005). Available: http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=getdocument&doi=10.1371/ journal.pmed.0020392. Accessed: March 1, 2008.
181. M. Sara Rosenthal, Women and Depression (Los Angeles: Lowell House, 2000), 157-158.
182. "Nourishing Your Brain. " Newsweek 137, no. 17(April 23, 2001):60.
183. John Schilb, "Autobiography after Prozac", in Rhetorical Bodies, ed. Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), 207.
184. Jennifer Radden, "Is This Dame Melancholy? Equating Today's Depression and Past Melancholia", Philosophy Psychiatry and Psychology (PPP) 10. 1(March 2003):37-52.
185. David Karp, Speaking of Sadness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 79.
186. An alternative reading of these metaphors of journey is suggested by the artistic and philosophical tradition of visualizing the insane as in transit, e.g., aboard a "ship of fools." The history of containment and travel for mentally ill individuals is echoed in the narrative progression of genres like the memoir. Further, considering this cultural history, it is possible to read the women's use of journey metaphors as participating in a larger cultural narrative/memory that seeks to keep mental illness in transit (and therefore never arriving home). See Sander L. Gilman, Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988), for more on the history of visualizations of illness.
187. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978).
188. Michael D. Yapko, "How to Handle Difficult People", Blues Buster 3, no. 9(November 2003):8.
189. "Hearts and Minds", Blues Buster 3, no. 1(January/February 2003):1, 6-7.
190. Ellen McGrath, "Action Strategies", Blues Buster 2, no. 10(November 2002):1-2.
191. Pat Wingert et al., "Young and Depressed", Newsweek 140, no. 15(October 7, 2002):52.
192. Malcolm Jones Jr. and Brad Stone, "The Death of a Native Son", Newsweek 129, no. 17(April 28, 1997):82.
193. Jones, "The Death of a Native Son", Newsweek 129, no. 17(April 28, 1997), 82.
194. David Gates, "Invitation to the Blues", Newsweek 137, no. 24(June 11, 2001):56.
195. Frank Bruni, "Public Lives: Tipper Gore Keeps Cautious Watch at Door She Opened", New York Times, June 7, 1999, 16.
196. Claude Elwood Shannon, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1949).
197. Faye Zucker, Depression (New York: Franklin Watts, 2003).
198. Geoffrey Cowley and Anne Underwood, "What Is SAMe?" Newsweek 134, no. 1(July 5, 1999):46, emphasis added.
199. Erica Goode, "Power of Positive Thinking May Have a Health Benefit, Study Says", New York Times, September 2, 2003, 5, emphasis added.
200. Cowley and Underwood, "What Is SAMe?" 46.
201. Ellen McGrath, "Action Strategies", Blues Buster 2, no. 3(March 2002):1-2.
202. "Brain's Big Two-Fer", Blues Buster 3, no. 8(October 2003):1, 4-5.
203. Food and Drug Administration, "FDA Launches a Multi-Pronged Strategy to Strengthen Safeguards for Children Treated with Antidepressant Medications" (October 15, 2004). Available online: http://www.fda.gov/bbs/ topics/news/2004/new01124.html.
204. William Styron, Darkness Visible (New York: Random House, 1990), 3.
205. Abigail Cheever, "Prozac Americans: Depression, Identity, and Selfhood", Twentieth Century Literature 46. 3(Autumn, 2000):346-368.
206. Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression (New York: Scribner, 2001), 11-12.
207. Meri Nana-Ama Danquah, Willow Weep for Me (New York: One World/Ballantine, 1999), 234-235.
208. Mary Anne Hughes, "Malignant Sadness (Book Review)", Library Journal 125, no. 4 (2000) 111.
209. See, for example, Arthur Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995);
210. Rita Charon, Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006);
211. Arthur Kleinman, The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing and the Human Condition (New York: Basic Books, 1988).
212. Irving Kirsch, Brett J. Deacon, Tania B. Huedo-Medina, Alan Scoboria, Thomas J. Moore, and Blair T. Johnson, "Initial Severity and Antidepressant Benefits: A Meta-Analysis of Data Submitted to the Food and Drug Administration", PLOS Medicine 5, no. 2 (2008).
213. Sharon Begley, "Depressing News on Antidepressants", Newsweek, Blog, February 25, 2008.
214. Judy Segal, "What Is a Story of Breast Cancer?" Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Genre Studies, Tubarão, Brazil, August 2007, 160-161.
215. Arthur Frank, At the Will of the Body (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin: 2002), 124.
216. Talcott Parsons's description of the "sick role" provides a model for the responsibilities attendant upon the relief from social obligations (e.g., going to work) that falling ill allows. Those in the sick role must place themselves in the care of medical institutions, and they must want to get well. This model, as Simon Williams describes it, views the sick role as "a socially prescribed mechanism for channeling and controlling" the deviance of illness (The Social System [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951], 123). Williams's sympathetic rereading of Parsons provides additional insight into the value of the "sick role" in the discursive late-modern environment.
217. See, for example, Robyn Fivush and Janine P. Buckner, "Gender, Sadness, and Depression: The Development of Emotional Focus through Gendered Discourse", in Gender and Emotion: Social Psychological Perspectives, ed. Agneta H. Fischer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 232-253.
218. For more on this vocabulary, see Fivush and Buckner, "Gender, Sadness, and Depression", 223.
219. Jeffrey Smith, Where Roots Reach for Water: A Personal and Natural History of Melancholia (New York: New Point Press, 1999), 243.
220. Tracy Thompson, The Beast: A Journey though Depression (New York: Plume, 1996), 176.
221. "Suicide: A Whole New View", Blues Buster 3, no. 4(May 2003):1, 6-7.
222. Daniel McGinn and Ron Depasquale, "Taking Depression On", Newsweek 144, no. 8(August 23, 2004):59-60.
223. A fourth occurrence refers to Howard Stern and Rosanne Barr as "unfortunate" poster children for obsessive-compulsive disorder. Jolie Solomon, Claudia Kalb, et al., "Breaking the Silence", Newsweek 127, no. 21(May 20, 1996):20.
224. John Leland, "The Night without End", Newsweek 134, no. 15(October 11, 1999):71-71.
225. "Even CEOs Get the Blues", Blues Buster 3, no. 2(March 2003):1, 4-7.
226. Burguieres's story of corporate success can be usefully read against Terry Bradshaw's story of sports fame. One article prefaces Bradshaw's depression as follows: "Terry Bradshaw had a lot to feel good about during the early 1990s. As a quarterback for the Pittsburgh Steelers, he had won four Super Bowls. He gained a spot in pro football's Hall of Fame the first year he was eligible. And, when he retired from football as a player in 1984, he made the jump to the broadcast side look easy.... Yet the surfeit of success left Bradshaw oddly joyless" (Michael C. Miller, "Stop Pretending Nothing's Wrong", Newsweek 141, no. 24 [June 16, 2003]: 71).
227. Quoted in Yahlin Chang, "Women Behaving Badly", Newsweek 131, no. 14(April 6, 1998):66.
228. Ann Burns, "Forecasts: Nonfiction", Publishers Weekly 245. 1 (1998) 53.
229. Bonnie Hoffman, "Book Reviews: Social Sciences", Library Journal 120. 3 (1995) 172.
230. Eve Leeman, "Answering Back to Prozac", Lancet 353. 9147 (1999) 155.
231. David Klinghoffer, "Prozac Nation: A Memoir (Book Review)", National Review 46, no. 21(7 November 1994):74-76.
232. Paul Chance, "Bookworms", Psychology Today 33, no. 1 (2000) 72.
233. W. W. Meissner, "Life on the Line", America 182, no. 19 (2000) 26.
234. Peter Kavanagh et al., "Critics' Choices for Christmas", Commonweal 128, no. 21 (2001) 21.
235. "Depression at Work", Blues Buster 3, no. 10(December 2003):1, 4-6.
236. "The Trouble with Men", Blues Buster 2, no. 1(December 2001/January 2002):1, 6-7.
237. Howard Fineman and Michael Isikoff, "Powell on the Brink", Newsweek 126, no. 19(November 6, 1995):36.
238. Mary Crowley, "Do Kids Need Prozac?" Newsweek 130, no. 16(October 20, 1997):73.
239. Gail Braccidiferro, "The Frustrations of Mental Health Care", New York Times, March 2, 2003, 1.
240. Jane E. Brody, "Personal Health; Invisible World of the Seriously Depressed Child", New York Times, December 2, 1997, 9.
241. Braccidiferro, "The Frustrations of Mental Health Care", 1.
242. Pat Wingert, "Young and Depressed", Newsweek 140, no. 15(October 7, 2002):52.
243. Debra Rosenberg and Matthew Cooper, "Tipper Steps Out", Newsweek 133, no. 21(May 24, 1999):48.
244. Susan H. Greenberg et al., "The Baby Blues and Beyond", Newsweek 138, no. 1(July 2, 2001):26.
245. Anemona Hartocollis, "Early Pangs of Empty Nest Syndrome When the Children Leave Home for College", New York Times, September 4, 2005, 34.
246. Greenberg et al., "The Baby Blues and Beyond", Newsweek.
247. Michael C. Miller, "Stop Pretending Nothing's Wrong", Newsweek 141, no. 24(June 16, 2003):71.
248. Mark Miller, "To Be Gay- And Mormon", Newsweek 135, no. 19(May 8, 2000):38.
249. Terry Pristin, "Two Dead in Shooting", New York Times, June 6, 1997, 1.
250. Emily Martin, "The Pharmaceutical Person", BioSocieties 1 (2006) 273.
251. The pharmaceutical habits of men do not receive the same narrative embedding as do those of women; men's antidepressant use is most often stated as a fact followed by the event of success. For example, a 78-year-old man is "prescribed Paxil and a brief course of psychotherapy [for his depression]. The depression has lifted" ("Gaps Seen in Treating Depression in Elderly", New York Times, September 5, 1999). In one notable exception, Tristan Logan's decision to receive testosterone replacement therapy appears within a longer narrative. The article describes Logan: "The 55-year-old, an avid weight lifter with a black belt in tae kwon do, was tired and weak. The amount of iron he was able to pump during workouts was decreasing, after steadily increasing for years. Worse, the antidepressants he takes seemed to stop working, and his mood darkened"
252. ("High on Testosterone", Newsweek, September 29, 2003). Logan's masculinity-potentially threatened by low levels of testosterone-is expressively restored via descriptions of his athletic achievements. Similar to the women whose pharmaceutical personhood is established through alternative therapies, Logan "has no plans to stop" his testosterone replacement.
253. Sue Miller, "A Natural Mood Booster", Newsweek 129, no. 18(May 5, 1997):74.
254. Michael D. Yapko, "What Drugs Can- and Can't-Do", Blues Buster 2, no. 8(September 2002):8.
255. Michale D. Yapko, "Who Gets to Decide What", Blues Buster 2, no. 2(February 2002):8.
256. Michael D. Yapko, "How to Get Help for a Loved One", Blues Buster 3, no. 1(January/February 2003):8.
257. Michael D. Yapko, "When Helplessness Drives Others Crazy", Blues Buster 3, no. 3(April 2003):8.
258. Deborah Schiffrin, Discourse Markers (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 268.
259. For a consideration of other nosologies, see Juan E. Mezzich, Yutaka Honda, and Marianne C. Kastrup, eds., Psychiatric Diagnosis: A World Perspective (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1994).
260. The move of the DSM into the public sphere can be seen in various general-interest publications. See, for example, Spiegel, "The Dictionary of Disorder", New Yorker, January 3, 2005);
261. Elliot, "A New Way to Be Mad", Atlantic Monthly, December 2000.
262. Carolyn R. Miller, "Genre as Social Action", in Genre and the New Rhetoric, ed. Aviva Freedman and Peter Medway (Bristol, Penn.: Taylor and Francis, 1994), 31.
263. For example, Catherine Schryer ("The Lab vs. the Clinic: Sites of Competing Genres", in Genre and the New Rhetoric, 105-124), identifies competing ideologies within a veterinary school by analyzing the laboratory and clinical genres. For more on genre theory
264. see the foundational collections in Aviva Freedman and Peter Medway, eds., Genre and the New Rhetoric (London: Taylor and Francis, 1994);
265. Wendy Bishop and Hans Ostrom, eds., Genre and Writing: Issues, Arguments, Alternatives (Portsmouth, N. H.: Boynton/Cook, 1997);
266. Richard Coe, Lorelei Lingard, and Tatiana Teslenko, eds., The Rhetoric and Ideology of Genre: Strategies for Stability and Change (Cresskill, N. J.: Hampton Press, 2002).
267. See, for example, Charles Bazerman, "Discursively Structured Activities", Mind, Culture, and Activity 4. 4 (1997) 296-308;
268. Anis Bawarshi, Genre and the Invention of the Writer (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2003), especially chapter 5;
269. Anne Freadman, "Uptake", in The Rhetoric and Ideology of Genre, 39-53.
270. Steven Woloshin et al., "Direct-to-Consumer Advertisements for Prescription Drugs: What Are Americans Being Sold?" The Lancet 358 (2001) 1146.
271. Michael S. Wilkes, Robert A. Bell, and Richard L. Kravitz, "Direct-to-Consumer Prescription Drug Advertising: Trends, Impact, and Implications", Drug Advertising 19. 2 (2000) 115.
272. See, for example, L. R. Krupka and A. M. Vener, "Gender Differences in Drug (Prescription, Non-Prescription, Alcohol and Tobacco) Advertising: Trends and Implications", Journal of Drug Issues 22, no. 2 (1992) 339-360. In addition, print and online advertisements for WebMD (available: http://www.webmd.com), a popular online source for health information, promote discussions with both medical professionals and also nonmedical celebrities as opportunities to talk about health issues.
273. A similar joke underlies the Shouts and Murmurs column by Louis Menand, "Listening to Bourbon", New Yorker, April 18, 1994, 108.
274. Carol Berkenkotter, "Genre Systems at Work: DSM-IV and Rhetorical Recontextualization in Psychotherapy Paperwork", Written Communication 18, no. 3 (2001) 330.
275. Hannah Lerman, Pigeonholing Women's Misery: A History and Critical Analysis of the Psychodiagnosis of Women in the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 5.
276. In addition to the concerns about influences on "objective" diagnoses, feminists have focused critical energy on exploring the ways that science has been used historically to control women's minds and bodies. Jill Astbury's Crazy for You: The Making of Women's Madness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) offers this kind of analysis, considering diagnoses like hysteria, depression, and battered child syndrome.
277. Joan Busfield, Men, Women and Madness: Understanding Gender and Mental Disorder (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 94.
278. These and other quizzes are available in the "Love & Sex" subsection of the "women's community online" iVillage.com (http://www.ivillage.com). Additional, healthrelated quizzes are available from the "Health and Well-Being" subsection of the same site.
279. American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: Fourth Ed. Text Rev. (DSM-IV-TR) (Washington, D. C.: American Psychiatric Association, 2000), 356.
280. See, for example, Carol Berkenkotter, "Genre Systems at Work: DSM-IV and Rhetorical Recontextualization in Psychotherapy Paperwork", Written Communication 18, no. 3 (2001) 326-349;
281. Carol Berkenkotter and Doris Ravotas, "New Research Strategies in Genre Analysis: Reported Speech as Recontextualization in a Psychotherapist's Notes and Initial Assessment", in Discourse Studies in Composition, ed. Ellen Barton and Gail Stygall (Cresskill, N. J.: Hampton Press, 2001), 229-256;
282. Carol Berkenkotter and Doris Ravotas, "Genre as Tool in the Transmission of Practice over Time and across Professional Boundaries", Mind, Culture, and Activity 4, no. 4 (1997) 256-274.
283. In 1997, the U. S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released guidelines for directto-consumer advertising that significantly relaxed the regulation of such marketing efforts. See, for example, Steven Findlay, Prescription Drugs and Mass Media Advertising (Washington, D. C.: National Institute of Health Care Management, 2000) Available: http://www.nihcm.org/~nihcmor/pdf/DTCbrief2001.pdf. Accessed: March 10, 2008.
284. As evidence of such popular interest, consider memoirs like Elizabeth Wurtzel's Prozac Nation (Boston/New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994)
285. nonfiction bestsellers like Peter Kramer's Listening to Prozac (New York: Penguin Books, 1993).
286. See, for example, the Pfizer's "Depression Checklist", available from the Zoloft Web site: http://www.zoloft.com/zoloft/zoloft.portal?- nfpb=true&-pageLabel=depr-checklist.
287. Prozac advertisement, Time, February 9, 1998, 98, emphasis added.
288. Zoloft advertisement, Newsweek, June 25, 2001, 58.
289. The measurement tools upon which these quizzes are based were developed in 1965 (W. W. K. Zung, "A Self-Rating Depression Scale", Archives of General Psychiatry 12 [1965]: 63-70);
290. (Center for Epidemiologic Studies, National Institute of Mental Health, Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale [CES-D] [Rockville, Md.: National Institute of Mental Health, 1971]);
291. 1995 (R. L. Spitzer et al., Prime-MD: Clinical Evaluation Guide [Pfizer, 1995]).
292. Emily Martin, Bipolar Expeditions: Mania and Depression in American Culture (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 2007), 183.
293. Arthur Kleinman, "Who We Are: Illness and Other Dangers to Everyday Moral Experience", Keynote Lecture, Case Western Reserve University, March 22, 2004.
294. The psychiatric redefinition of sadness as depression is the subject of Allan V. Horwitz, Jerome C. Wakefield, and Robert L. Spitzer, The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
295. Lauren Slater, Prozac Diary (New York: Penguin Books, 1998), 11.
296. Rita Charon, Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), viii.
297. Something like this is implied in Cheryl Mattingly, Healing Dramas and Clinical Plots: The Narrative Structure of Experience (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Mattingly finds that patients who can construct successful narratives recover more quickly from their illnesses.
298. "Taking Depression On", Newsweek, August 23, 2004.