title: An Illness of Power: Gender and the Social Causes of Depression.
abstract: There is considerable discourse surrounding the disproportionate diagnosis of women with depression as compared to men, often times cited at a rate around 2:1. While this disparity clearly draws attention to gender, a focus on gender tends to fall away in the study and treatment of depression in neuroscience and psychiatry, which largely understand its workings in mechanistic terms of brain chemistry and neurological processes. I first consider how this brain-centered biological model for depression came about. I then argue that the authoritative scientific models for disorder have serious consequences for those diagnosed. Finally, I argue that mechanistic biological models of depression have the effect of silencing women and marginalizing or preventing the examination of social-structural causes of depression, like gender oppression, and therein contribute to the ideological reproduction of oppressive social relations. I argue that depression is best understood in terms of systems of power, including gender, and where a given individual is situated within such social relations. The result is a model of depression that accounts for the influence of biological, psychological, and social factors.
authors.affiliation: Department of Philosophy, Michigan State University, 368 Farm Lane, 503 South Kedzie Hall, East Lansing, MI, 48824-1032, USA. neitzkea@msu.edu.
authors.forename: Alex B
authors.initials: AB
authors.lastname: Neitzke
mesh_terms: D003866:Depressive Disorder / Q000209:etiology*; D005260:Female; D019513:Feminism; D005783:Gender Identity; D049673:History, 20th Century; D049674:History, 21st Century; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008960:Models, Psychological; D011570:Psychiatry / Q000266:history*; D012919:Social Behavior
keywords: Biopsychosocial; Depression; Feminist psychology; Gender; Relations of power