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

Notes

189 NOTES INTRODUCTION: DEPRESSION AND GENDER IN THE AGE OF SELF-CARE 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; Pfizer’s Zoloft (sertraline hydrochloride), approved in 1991; Glaxo-SmithKline’s Paxil (paroxetine hydrochloride), approved in 1992; Wyeth Pharmaceutical’s Effexor (venlafaxine hydrochloride), approved in 1993; Forest Labs’ Celexa (citalopram hydrobromide), approved in 1998; Forest Labs’ Lexapro (escitalopram oxalate), approved in 2002; and Eli Lilly’s Cymbalta (duloxetine hydrochloride), approved in 2004. 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); Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels, Selling Sickness (New York: Nation Books, 2005); and Peter Kramer, Against Depression (New York: Viking, 2005). One exception is Jonathan Metzl’s Prozac on the Couch (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), which reads medical and psychiatric journals, popular news reports, and pharmaceutical advertisements against the cultural scripts of psychoanalysis and biological psychiatry. Even in this important work, however, Metzl’s attention to texts is limited to their ability to reflect cultural assumptions and categories. 9. William Styron, Darkness Visible (New York: Random House, 1990), 37. 10. Irving Kirsch, Brett J. Deacon, Tania B. Huedo-Medina, Alan Scoboria, Thomas J. Moore, and Blair T. Johnson, “Initial Severity and Antidepressant Benefits: A MetaAnalaysis 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#top. Accessed: March 1, 2008. 11. 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; 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; and H. C. Schulberg et al., “Assessing Depression in Primary Medical and Psychiatric Practices,” Archives of General Psychiatry 42, no. 12 (1985): 1164–1170. 12. Gay Eade and Julie Bradshaw, “Understanding Discourses of the Worried Well,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Mental Health Nursing 4 (1995): 61–69. 13. For more on ethnographic interviewing, see James P. Spradley, The Ethnographic Interview (Fort Worth, Tex.: Harcourt College Publishers, 1979); Elliot G. Mishler, Research Interviewing: Context and Narrative (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986); Ruthellen Josselson, ed., Ethics and Process in the Narrative Study of Lives (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1996). 14. See Healy, Let Them Eat Prozac, for a description of the counterdiscourses, including critiques of the pharmaceutical industry for withholding information. 15. 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). 1. DEPRESSION, A RHETORICAL ILLNESS 1. See, for example, Dana Crowley Jack, Silencing the Self...