| Abstrakt: |
The standard sociological approaches to women's mental health have tended to attribute women's higher rates of mental illness either to the objective structural conditions of gender inequality on the sexiest treatment of women by psychiatry and the mostly male medical establishment. This paper draws from Thoits' self-labeling theory that conceptualizes mental illness as emotional deviance to offer an alternative to the victimization models that dominate studies of women's mental health. Using the debate over postpartum illness, I document the significance of women's agency as patients, medical providers, and self-help activists in the recognition and definition of women's mental health problems. I draw from interviews with women who have suffered emotional distress following the birth or adoption of child, interviews with physicians and mental health providers, and the popular and medical discourse on pregnancy and childbirth to demonstrate that postpartum depression is a socially constructed emotion that women use to accept, negotiate, and resist norms and cultural ideals about gender, motherhood, and the female self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
