Depression Memoirs in the Circuits of Culture: Sexism, Sanism, Neoliberalism, and Narrative Identity

Ginger Hoffman and Jennifer Hansen’s study of gender dynamics in psychiatric disability memoirs makes several fruitful moves for the study of psychic diversity. Perhaps the most important is that the article encourages analytic philosophers to contribute to understanding how individual mental life is affected by the larger cultural context—which we can think of as the “mind/culture” problem. This is an important move because, for the most part, analytic philosophers have paid more attention to the mind/body problem than they have to the mind/culture problem. Hoffman and Hansen are right that it would be valuable for analytic philosophy to join in the study of this equally complicated conceptual problem. Their article also provides a nuanced review and application of several contemporary narrative theories of the self. And, finally, the article nicely works out two gendered themes—neediness and uncreativity—that show up in the popular depression memoirs they analyzed.

I use my comments to support Hoffman and Hansen’s work and to develop four dimensions of the topic from my more cultural studies and narrative psychiatry perspective: 1) contradictions in popular culture, 2) depression memoirs in larger circuits of culture, 3) generalizing narrative theory, and 4) implications of narrative identity for continued scholarship.

The first theme, contradictions in popular culture, is the briefest. There are several moments in the article where Hoffman and Hansen qualify their comments by emphasizing that although they are pointing to problematic, or what they call “harmful,” vectors in depression memoirs they do not want to dismiss advantages, or helpful, vectors. In addition, they are aware that consumers may read these memoirs in more than one way and there is not a one-to-one relationship between their own reading and the ones that others will do. My cultural studies background would support both of these qualifiers and just add that these contradictions are at the heart of all popular culture. To be popular, cultural artifacts tend toward the contradictory. For example, think of the icon of Madonna’s torn jeans—were Madonna’s jeans regressive, objectifying, and therefore “bad,” or were they progressive, empowering, and therefore “good”? The only satisfactory answer is both. This means that, in general, the clearest path for academic analysis of popular culture is to recognize that popular culture generally contains this kind of structured contradiction. The role of scholarship of the popular is to chart out the conflicting vectors rather than try to adjudicate “good” or “bad” (Lewis, 2007).

Similarly, regardless of the values and politics encoded into popular artifact, readers/consumers will have a range of contradictory responses or readings. Stuart Hall (1980) sketches these different readings as dominant-hegemonic, oppositional, and negotiated readings. Dominant-hegemonic readings internalize the messages as the encoders intended, resistant readings do the opposite, and negotiated are somewhere in between. For example, the pledge of allegiance can be read from a dominant perspective (“liberty and justice for all”), a resistant perspective (“liberty and justice for rich people”), or a negotiated perspective (“liberty and justice mostly for rich people but some trickle down for others as well”). Again, this makes it hard to adjudicate “good” or “bad,” but scholarship can still be used to chart out the problematic dimensions of dominant-hegemonic readings.

The second theme I address involves putting the gender dynamics of depression memoirs in the context of the larger cultural and political representations. If we consider depression memoirs as a representational practice that contributes to the cultural meaning of depression, we can see that depression memoirs are only a small fraction of the many representations of depression circulating in culture. People who read depression memoirs are also exposed to many other representational artifacts. These additional cultural representations come from a variety of sources, but what is important to understand in making sense of the cultural politics of mental difference is that a majority of these representations of depression are actively controlled by pharmaceutical industry marketing.

Indeed, controlling the cultural environment around medical and psychiatric concerns is at the heart of the pharmaceutical industry’s business plan, and...