Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

The antidepressant in women’s lifeworlds: feminist materialist encounters

  • Original Article
  • Published:
BioSocieties Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

This article examines how a particular class of material objects—antidepressants—circulate in women’s social, cultural and intimate lifeworlds. Following the action of antidepressants in their encounters with bodies and brains by way of the agencies they express and the specific work they perform reveals much of the social, affective and material gendering of depression, along with the everyday activities by which this gendering is resisted. Drawing on data from a qualitative research project, we examine how women conceptualise their brains as needing ‘work’ through antidepressants, and then consider the particular kinds of ‘work’ that these objects perform. In instances where they refuse antidepressant medication, women co-constitute antidepressants as objects to be resisted and objects that resist, reframing in the process relationships between corporeality, diagnosis and pharmaceutical matter. The ‘female’ brain emerges in our study as a potent site for the gendering of depression as antidepressants become entangled in the social, material and affective dynamics of women’s everyday lives.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • Alaimo, S., and S. Hekman (eds.). 2008. Material Feminisms. Indiana: Indiana University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Andrews, G.J., and C. Duff. 2019a. Matter Beginning to Matter: On Posthumanist Understandings of the Vital Emergence of Health. Social Science & Medicine 226: 123–134.

    Google Scholar 

  • Australian Bureau of Statistics. 2016. Patterns of Use of Mental Health Services and Prescription Medications, 2011. Canberra: Australian Bureau of Statistics. https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/by%20Subject/4329.0.00.003~2011~Main%20Features~Antidepressants~10008.

  • Barad, K. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bennett, J. 2004. The Force of Things: Steps Towards an Ecology of Matter. Political Theory 32 (3): 347–372.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bennett, J. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Berrios, G.E. 1988. Melancholia and Depression During the 19th Century: A Conceptual History. The British Journal of Psychiatry 153 (3): 298–304.

    Google Scholar 

  • Connelly, R., and E. Krongar (eds.). 2017. Gender and Time Use in a Global Context: The Economics of Employment and Unpaid Labor. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Coole, D., and S. Frost. 2010. Introducing the New Materialisms. In New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency and Politics, ed. D. Coole and S. Frost, 1–43. Durham: Duke University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Craig, L. 2006. Children and the Revolution: A Time-Diary of the Impact of Motherhood on Daily Workload. Journal of Sociology 42 (2): 125–143.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cvetkovich, A. 2012. Depression: A Public Feeling. Durham: Duke University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Davey, C.G., and A.M. Chanen. 2016. The Unfulfilled Promise of the Antidepressant Medications. Medical Journal of Australia 204 (9): 348–350.

    Google Scholar 

  • DeLanda, M. 2006. A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. London: Continuum.

    Google Scholar 

  • Duff, C. 2014. Assemblages of Health: Deleuze’s Empiricism and the Ethology of Life. Dordrecht: Springer.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dumit, J. 2003. Is It Me or My Brain? Depression and Neuroscience Facts. Journal of Medical Humanities 2 (41–2): 35–47.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fitzgerald, D. 2017. Tracing Autism: Uncertainty, Ambiguity, and the Affective Labor of Neuroscience. Washington: University of Washington Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Flore, J., et al. 2019b. Unravelling Subjectivity, Embodied Experience and (Taking) Psychotropic Medication. Social Science & Medicine 230: 66–73.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fox, N.J., and P. Alldred. 2014. New Materialist Social Inquiry: Design, Methods and the Research-Assemblage. International Journal of Social Research Methodology 18 (4): 399–414.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fox, N.J., and P. Alldred. 2017. Sociology and the New Materialism: Theory, Research, Action. London: SAGE.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fullagar, S. 2009. Negotiating the Neurochemical Self: Anti-Depressant Consumption in Women’s Recovery from Depression. Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine 13 (4): 389–406.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fullagar, S. 2011. Travelling with and Beyond Depression: Women’s Narratives of Recovery and Identity. In Accessible Tourism: Concepts and Issues, ed. D. Buhalis and S. Darcy, 123–138. Buffalo: Channel View Publications.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fullagar, S., and W. O’Brien. 2012. Immobility, Battles and the Journey to Feeling Alive: Women's Metaphors of Self-Transformation Through Depression and Recovery. Qualitative Health Research 22 (8): 1063–1072.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fullagar, S., and W. O’Brien. 2014. Social Recovery and the Move Beyond Deficit Models of Depression: A Feminist Analysis of Mid-Life Women’s Self-Care Practices. Social Science & Medicine 117: 116–124.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fullagar, S., and W. O’Brien. 2018. Rethinking Women’s Experiences of Depression and Recovery as Emplacement: Spatiality, Care and Gender Relations in Rural Australia. Journal of Rural Studies 58: 12–19.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fullagar, S., et al. 2019a. Feminist Theories After the Poststructuralist Turn. In Feminisms in Leisure Studies: Advancing a Fourth Wave, ed. D.C. Parry, 34–57. London and New York: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fullagar, S., et al. 2019b. Feminism and a Vital Politics of Depression and Recovery. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Furukawa, T.A., et al. 2017. Initial Severity of Depression and Efficacy of Cognitive–Behavioural Therapy: Individual-Participant Data Meta-Analysis of Pill-Placebo-Controlled Trials. British Journal of Psychiatry 210 (30): 190–196.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jackson, A.Y., and L.A. Mazzei. 2012. Barad: Thinking with Intra-action. In Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research: Viewing Data across Multiple Perspectives, ed. A.Y. Jackson and L.A. Mazzei, 118–136. New York: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jackson, A.Y., and L.A. Mazzei. 2013. Plugging One Text into Another: Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research. Qualitative Inquiry 19 (4): 261–271.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jutel, A. 2015. Beyond the Sociology of Diagnosis. Sociology Compass 9 (9): 841–852.

    Google Scholar 

  • Haraway, D. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hekman, S. 2010. The Material of Knowledge: Feminist Disclosures. Indiana: Indiana University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kirsch, I. 2011. Antidepressants and the Placebo Response. In De-Medicalizing Misery: Psychiatry, Psychology and the Human Condition, ed. M. Rapley, J. Moncrieff, and J. Dillon, 189–196. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kokanović, R., and B. Philip. 2014. Emotional Talk: Depression, Diagnosis and Disclosure. In Disclosure in Health and Illness, ed. M. Davis and L. Manderson, 56–71. Abingdon: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kokanović, R., et al. 2013. Depression: The Ambivalence of Diagnosis. Sociology of Health and Illness 35 (3): 377–390.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kuehner, C. 2017. Why is Depression More Common Among Women Than Among Men? The Lancet Psychiatry 4 (2): 146–158.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lafrance, M.N. 2009. Women and Depression: Recovery and Resistance. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lakoff, A. 2007. The Right Patients for the Drug: Managing the Placebo Effect in Antidepressant Trial. BioSocieties 2: 57–71.

    Google Scholar 

  • McLeod, K. 2014. The Missing Work of Collaboration: Using Assemblages to Rethink Antidepressant Action. Contemporary Drug Problems 41: 109–142.

    Google Scholar 

  • Metzl, J. 2003. Prozac on the Couch: Prescribing Gender in the Era of Wonder Drugs. Durham: Duke University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Metzl, J., and J. Angel. 2004. Assessing the Impact of SSRI Antidepressants on Popular Notions of Women’s Depressive Illness. Social Science and Medicine 58: 577–584.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mol, A. 2002. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham: Duke University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Murray, S.B. 2011. Getting Paid in Smiles: The Gendering of Child Care Work. Symbolic Interaction 23 (2): 135–160.

    Google Scholar 

  • Niewöhner, J., and M. Lock. 2018. Situating Local Biologies: Anthropological Perspectives on Environment/Human Entanglements. BioSocieties 13 (4): 681–697.

    Google Scholar 

  • Palazidou, E. 2012. The Neurobiology of Depression. British Medical Bulletin 101 (1): 127–145.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pitts-Taylor, V. (ed.). 2016a. Mattering: Feminism, Science, and Materialism. New York: New York University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pitts-Taylor, V. 2016b. The Brain’s Body: Neuroscience and Corporeal Politics. Durham: Duke University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Porto, P.R., et al. 2009. Does Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Change the Brain? A Systematic Review of Neuroimaging in Anxiety Disorders. Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience 21 (2): 114–125.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rich, J.L., et al. 2013. Prevalence and Correlates of Depression Among Australian Women: A Systematic Literature Review, January 1999-January 2010. BMC Research Notes 6: 424–440.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ridge, D. 2018. Making Sense of the Evolving Nature of Depression Narratives and Their Inherent Conflicts. Subjectivity 11: 144–160.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ridge, D., et al. 2015. ‘My Dirty Little Habit’: Patient Constructions of Antidepressant Use and the ‘Crisis’ of Legitimacy. Social Science & Medicine 146: 53–61.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rose, N. 2019. Our Psychiatric Future: The Politics of Mental Health. Cambridge: Polity Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rose, N., and J. Abi-Rached. 2013. Neuro: The New Brain Sciences and the Management of the Mind. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Stewart, K. 2007. Ordinary Affects. Durham: Duke University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Stone, M., and R. Kokanović. 2016. ‘Halfway Towards Recovery’: Rehabilitating the Relational Self in Narratives of Postnatal Depression. Social Science & Medicine 163: 98–106.

    Google Scholar 

  • Stone, M., et al. 2018. Care(less) Encounters: Early Maternal Distress and the Haunted Clinic. Subjectivity 11 (2): 108–127.

    Google Scholar 

  • Stone, M., et al. 2019. Estranged Relations: Coercion and Care in Narratives of Supported Decision-Making in Mental Healthcare. Medical Humanities 46 (1): 62–72.

    Google Scholar 

  • Stoppard, J. 2014. Understanding Depression: Feminist Social Constructionist Approaches. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Trivelli, E. 2014. Depression, Performativity and the Conflicted Body: An Auto-ethnography of Self-Medication. Subjectivity 7 (2): 151–170.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tronto, J. 2005[1993]. Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic Of Care. New York: Routledge.

  • Ussher, J.M. 2010. Are We Medicalizing Women’s Misery? A Critical Review of Women’s Higher Rates of Reported Depression. Feminism & Psychology 29 (1): 9–35.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ussher, J.M. 2011. The Madness of Women: Myth and Experience. East Sussex: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wilson, E.A. 2015. Gut Feminism. Durham: Duke University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wykes, T., and F. Callard. 2010. Diagnosis, Diagnosis, Diagnosis: Towards DSM-5. Journal of Mental Health 19 (4): 301–304.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

This study was funded by an Australia Research Council Linkage Project grant (LP0990229). The authors would like to thank the participants who generously shared their experiences, and the co-investigators and research staff on the original study. The authors would also like to thank the reviewers of this article for their insightful comments.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Social and Global Studies Centre, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, RMIT University, GPO 2476, Melbourne, VIC, 3001, Australia

    Jacinthe Flore & Renata Kokanović

  2. School of Management, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia

    Cameron Duff

  3. Department of Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK

    Felicity Callard

Authors
  1. Jacinthe Flore
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Renata Kokanović
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Cameron Duff
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Felicity Callard
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jacinthe Flore.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Flore, J., Kokanović, R., Duff, C. et al. The antidepressant in women’s lifeworlds: feminist materialist encounters. BioSocieties 16, 177–195 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41292-020-00189-2

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41292-020-00189-2

Keywords

Search

Navigation