Men's Discourses Of Depression

This study takes up the issue of men's experiences of depression. It argues that a discourse analytic focus upon the experience of mental illness offers insights important not only to social scientists but also to mental health scholars and practitioners. The micro-analytic examination of discursively constructed experience of depression shows a complex and uneasy relationship between the illness and those who are ill, indicating that experience of mental illness escapes attempts to describe it by means of a few, quite ambivalent diagnostic criteria. The challenge to the mainstream views of depression comes, Galasinski argues, from the inevitable anchoring of depression experience in the dominant model of masculinity. This challenge is embedded within a larger discussion of a hiatus between the dominant ideologies of depression, stipulating its universality, with how it is experienced by individual men. Galasinski finishes with a postulate including the focus on the discursive form of how mentally ill people account for their experiences and thus on their suffering, rather than the 'symptoms' they display.

Dariusz Galasinski is Professor of Discourse and Cultural Studies in the University of Wolverhampton and Visiting Professor in the Warsaw School of Social Psychology.