title: Constructions of the self in interaction with the Beck Depression Inventory.
abstract: In this article, I am interested in discourses of people completing the Polish version of the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI). I focus upon the negotiation of the spaces for constructing the self opened by the BDI. My corpus consists of transcripts of 50 sessions in which self-reportedly healthy people were asked to ;think aloud' while completing the BDI. I shall demonstrate that in interactions with the ;depression scale', the informants mostly rejected the spaces offered by it. Three strategies of such rejection are discussed: reformulation, recontextualization and an explicit challenge to the categories offered by the BDI. I shall argue that the concerns of lived experience in a particular context, when not subdued by the relationship of power in the situation of medical examination, overrule the frame imposed by the a-contextual questionnaire of sadness. Insight into depression or its intensity offered by ;context-free' psychological or psychiatric instrument, set outside lived experience, is extremely problematic.
authors.affiliation: University of Wolverhampton, UK. d.galasinski@wlv.ac.uk
authors.forename: Dariusz
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Galasinski
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D000368:Aged; D003866:Depressive Disorder / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000523:psychology; D004522:Educational Status; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011594:Psychometrics / Q000379:methods*; D012647:Self-Assessment; D012720:Severity of Illness Index