The Recovery Imperative: A Critical Examination of Mid-life Women's Recovery From Depression

Abstract

Depression has been identified as a gendered health problem and in Australia is the leading cause of the non-fatal disease burden in women. Depression is also considered to be a chronic episodic disorder, and those afflicted are expected to experience a recurrence throughout their lifetime. Current treatments focus on pharmaceutical and psychological interventions aimed at correcting the internal problem of depression. Whilst there is a growing body of feminist research questioning how depression is more commonly associated with women, less research has focused on the gendered experience of recovery. This research employs a qualitative methodology, within a sociological and feminist post-structuralist approach, to critically examine the discourses and assumptions that inform the “relapse cycle” in women’s depression that makes recovery so problematic. It also considers how the “imperative to recover” may in fact be implicated in perpetuating the cycle of recovery and relapse that characterises the chronicity of many women’s experiences of depression. This is particularly significant, as the focus on recovery has become central to government policies and the delivery of mental health services, yet gender issues have been largely invisible. In response, this research critically examines how recovery is discursively produced within policy and women’s lives. Drawing on Foucault’s work on ethical practices of self formation, the research examines how women at midlife are urged to become particular kinds of subjects in recovery. The research explores the tensions that emerge between normalized biomedical and psy-mediated recovery practices and women’s efforts to engage in ethical practices of self care. This is often problematic, as gendered expectations and neo-liberal discourses of self-responsibility intersect to constitute norms that limit notions of recovered feminine subjectivity. As such this study critiques the effect of the dominant ways of “knowing” depression and recovery. The findings from this study suggest that the “practical wisdom” of the everyday practices that women draw on, as they resist, refuse and comply with normalised discourses of recovery, may provide an important source of knowledge that counters the disabling effects of the “recovery imperative”.