“A View You Won’t Get Anywhere Else”? Depressed Mothers, Public Regulation and ‘Private’ Narrative

Feminist Legal Studies - Tập 17 - Trang 123-143 - 2009
Ruth Cain1
1School of Law, Keele University, Staffordshire, UK

Tóm tắt

The existence of ‘postnatal’ or maternal depression (PND) is contested, and subject to various medico-legal and cultural definitions. Mothers remain subject to complex systems of scrutiny and regulation. In medico-legal discourse, postnatal distress is portrayed as a tragic pathology of mysterious (but probably hormonal) origin. A PND diagnosis denotes ‘imbalance’ in the immediate postnatal period, although women experience increased incidence of depression throughout maternity. Current treatment patterns emphasise medication and tend to elide the perspective of the individual sufferer in favour of a blanket disease model. I emphasise the need for a feminist reassessment of maternal distress and the means available to ‘testify’ to its forms, and argue for PND to be analysed in biopolitical terms, perhaps as a ‘habitus’ materialising the low status and pervasive privatisation of Western mothers.

Tài liệu tham khảo

Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo sacer: Sovereign power and bare life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Alder, Christine, and Ken Polk. 2001. Child victims of homicide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. American Psychiatric Association. 2000. Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (DSM-IV-TR), 4th ed. Washington: American Psychiatric Association. Aristodemou, Maria. 1997. Language, ethics and imagination: Narratives of the (m)other in law and literature. New Formations 32: 34–48. Austin, Marie-Paule. 2004. Antenatal screening and early intervention for ‘perinatal’ distress, depression and anxiety: Where to from here? Archives of Women’s Mental Health 7 (1): 1–6. Ballard, Clive, and R. Davies. 1996. Postnatal depression in fathers. International Review of Psychiatry 8 (1): 65–71. Belsky, Jay. 1986. Infant day care: A cause for concern? Zero to Three 6: 1–6. Berlant, Lauren. 1997. The queen of America goes to Washington City: Essays on sex and citizenship. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Berlant, Lauren (ed.). 2008. Compassion: The culture and politics of an emotion. New York: Routledge. Bewley, Susan, Melanie Davies, and Peter Braude. 2005. Which career first? The most secure age for childbearing remains 20–35. British Medical Journal 331: 588–589. Blackman, Lisa. 2007. Psychiatric culture and bodies of resistance. Body & Society 13 (2): 1–23. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The logic of practice (trans. Nice, Richard). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bowlby, John. 1973. Attachment and loss, vol. 3. New York: Basic Books. Brennan, Teresa. 2003. The transmission of affect. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Brown, Stephanie, and Judith Lumley. 2000. Physical health problems after childbirth and maternal depression at six to seven months postpartum. BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology 107: 1194–1201. Burstow, Bonnie. 1992. Radical feminist therapy: Working in the context of violence. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Burstow, Bonnie. 2003. Towards a radical understanding of trauma and trauma work. Violence Against Women 9: 1293–1317. Busby, Sian. 2004. The cruel mother. London: Short Books. Büskens, Petra. 2001. The impossibility of “natural parenting” for modern mothers: On social structure and the formation of habit. Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering 3 (1): 75–86. Chesler, Phyllis. 1972. Women and madness. New York: Doubleday. Cipriani, Andrea, John R. Geddes, Toshi A. Furukawa, and Corrado Barbui. 2007. Metareview on short-term effectiveness and safety of antidepressants for depression: An evidence-based approach to inform clinical practice. Canadian Journal of Psychiatry 52: 553–562. Clarke, Adele E., Janet K. Shim, Laura Mamo, Jennifer Ruth Fosket, and Jennifer R. Fishman. 2003. Biomedicalization: Technoscientific transformations of health, illness, and US biomedicine. American Sociological Review 68: 161–194. Crompton, Rosemary. 2006. Employment and the family: The reconfiguration of work and family life in contemporary societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crompton, Rosemary, Suzan Lewis, and Clare Lyonette (eds.). 2007. Women, men, work and family in Europe. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Cusk, Rachel. 2001. A life’s work: On becoming a mother. London: HarperCollins. Dally, Ann. 1982. Inventing motherhood: The consequences of an ideal. London: Burnett Books. Dalton, Katharina, with Wendy M. Holton. 2001. Depression after childbirth: How to recognise, treat and prevent postnatal depression, 4th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Davis, Deanna L. 1992. Feminist critics and literary mothers: Daughters reading Elizabeth Gaskell. Signs 17: 507–532. Downs, Donald A. 1996. More than victims: Battered women, the syndrome society, and the law. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Drakopoulou, Maria. 2000. The ethic of care, female subjectivity and feminist legal scholarship. Feminist Legal Studies 8: 199–266. Duncan, Simon, and Rosalind Edwards. 1999. Lone mothers, paid work and gendered moral rationalities. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Farquhar, Dion. 1999. Gamete traffic/pedestrian crossings. In Playing dolly: Technocultural formations, fantasies, and fictions of assisted reproduction, ed. Susan Squier and E. Ann Kaplan, 17–36. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Ford, Gina. 2002. The new contented little baby book. London: Vermilion. Friedan, Betty. 1965. The feminine mystique. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Franklin, Sarah. 1991. Fetal fascinations: New dimensions to the medical-scientific construction of fetal personhood. In Off centre: Feminism and cultural studies, ed. Sarah Franklin, Celia Lury, and Jackie Stacey, 190–213. London: Harper Collins. Franklin, Sarah. 1997. Embodied progress: A cultural account of assisted conception. London: Routledge. Gavron, Hannah. 1968. The captive wife: Conflicts of housebound mothers. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Gies, Lieve. 2009. Amateur digital imaging and the iconography of bare life. Unpublished manuscript on file with author. Gentile, Salvatore. 2007. Serotonin reuptake inhibitor-induced perinatal complications. Pediatric Drugs 9 (2): 97–106. Grabham, Emily. 2007. Managing bipolar: Flesh, agency and the psychopharmaceutical “self”. Unpublished manuscript on file with author. Grosz, Elizabeth. 1994. Volatile bodies: Towards a corporeal feminism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Guedeney, Nicole, Jacques Fermanian, Julien-Daniel Guelfi, and R. Channi Kumar. 2000. The Edinburgh postnatal depression scale (EPDS) and the detection of major depressive disorders in early postpartum: Some concerns about false negatives. Journal of Affective Disorders 61 (1–2): 107–112. Hamilton, Jean A., and Nancy Felipe Russo. 2006. Women and depression: Research, theory and social policy. In Women and depression: A handbook for the social, behavioral and biomedical sciences, ed. Corey Keyes and Sherryl H. Goodman, 479–533. New York: Cambridge University Press. Harding, Sandra. 1986. The science question in feminism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Hausman, Bernice. 2003. Mother’s milk: Breastfeeding controversies in American culture. New York: Routledge. Hays, Sharon. 1998. The cultural contradictions of motherhood. London: Yale University Press. Healy, David. 1997. The antidepressant era. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Heron, Jonathan, Thomas O’Connor, Jonathan Evans, Jean Golding, Vivette Glover, and the ALSPAC Study Team. 2004. The course of anxiety and depression through pregnancy and the postpartum in a community sample. Journal of Affective Disorders 80 (1): 65–73. Hirsch, Marianne. 1989. The mother-daughter plot: Narrative, psychoanalysis, feminism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Hu, X. Henry, Scott A. Bull, Enid Hunkeler, Eileen Ming, Janelle Y. Lee, Bruce Fireman, and Leona E. Markson. 2004. Incidence and duration of side effects and those rated as bothersome with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor treatment for depression: Patient report versus physician estimate. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry 65: 959–965. Hunt, Jan. 2002. The natural child: Parenting from the heart. Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers. Kahn, Coppélia. 1993. Mother. In Changing subjects: The making of feminist literary criticism, ed. Gayle Greene and Coppélia Kahn, 157–167. London: Routledge. Kaplan, E. Ann. 2005. Trauma culture: The politics of terror and loss in media and literature. Piscataway. NJ: Rutgers University Press. Keyes, Corey, and Sherryl H. Goodman (eds.). 2006. Women and depression: A handbook for the social, behavioral and biomedical sciences. New York: Cambridge University Press. Kilkey, Majella. 2000. Lone mothers between work and care: The policy regime in twenty countries. Aldershot: Ashgate. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of horror: An essay on abjection (trans. Roudiez, Leon S.). New York: Columbia University Press. Kramar, Kirsten, and William Watson. 2006. The insanities of reproduction: Medico-legal knowledge and the development of infanticide law. Social & Legal Studies 15 (2): 237–255. Kurstjen, Sophie, and Dieter Wolke. 2001. Effects of maternal depression on cognitive development of children over the first seven years of life. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry and Allied Disciplines 42: 623–636. Law Commission. 2006. Murder, manslaughter and infanticide. Project 6 of the ninth programme of law reform: Homicide. London: TSO. Leach, Penelope. 2003. Your baby and child. London: Dorling Kindersley. Lee, Ellie. 2003. Abortion, motherhood and mental health: Medicalizing reproduction in the United States and Great Britain. New York: Walter de Gruyter. Littlewood, Jane, and Nessa McHugh. 1997. Maternal distress and postnatal depression: The myth of Madonna. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Luckhurst, Roger. 2003. Traumaculture. New Formations 50 (1): 28–47. Marshall, Harriette, and Anne Woolett. 2000. Fit to reproduce? The regulative role of pregnancy texts. Feminism and Psychology 10: 351–366. Martin, Emily. 1987. The woman in the body: A cultural analysis of reproduction. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. McNay, Lois. 1999. Gender, habitus and the field: Pierre Bourdieu and the limits of reflexivity. Theory. Culture and Society 16: 95–117. Meyer, Cheryl, and Michelle Oberman. 2001. Mothers who kill their children: Understanding the acts of moms from Susan Smith to the “Prom Mom”. New York: New York University Press. Miller, Laura J. 2002. Postpartum depression. Journal of the American Medical Association 287: 762–765. Miller, Nancy K. 1995. Mothers, daughters and autobiography: Maternal legacies and cultural criticism. In Mothers in law: Feminist theory and the legal regulation of motherhood, ed. Martha Albertson Fineman and Isabel Karpin, 3–26. New York: Columbia University Press. Mind. 1994. Understanding postnatal depression. London: Mind. Moore, Anna. 2004. Mother’s ruin. The Observer, 19 January. http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2004/jan/18/mentalhealth.observermagazine. Accessed 10 Mar 2008. Morrissey, Matthew. 2007. Suffer no more in silence: Challenging the myths of women’s mental health in childbearing. International Journal of Psychiatric Nursing Research 12: 1429–1438. Moynihan, Ray, and Alan Cassels. 2005. Selling sickness: How the drug companies are turning us all into patients. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen and Unwin. Naffine, Ngaire. 2004. Our legal lives as men, women and persons. Legal Studies 24: 621–642. National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE). 2007. Antenatal and postnatal health: Clinical management and service guidance. London: NICE. Newport, D. Jeffrey, Molly Wilcox, and Zachary Stowe. 2002. Maternal depression: A child’s first adverse life event. Seminars in Clinical Neuropsychiatry 7 (2): 113–119. Nicolson, Paula. 1998. Post natal depression: Psychology, science and the transition to motherhood. London: Routledge. Oakley, Ann. 1974a. Housewife. London: Allen Lane. Oakley, Ann. 1974b. The sociology of housework. London: Martin Robertson. Oakley, Ann. 1980. Women confined: Toward a sociology of childbirth. Oxford: Martin Robertson. Oakley, Ann. 1981. From here to maternity. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Oberman, Michelle. 2003. Mothers who kill: Cross-cultural patterns in and perspectives on contemporary maternal filicide. International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 26: 493–514. Oberman, Michelle, and Cheryl L. Meyer. 2008. When mothers kill: Interviews from prison. New York: New York University Press. Parker, Roszika. 1995. Torn in two: The experience of maternal ambivalence. London: Virago. Pearson, Allison. 2003. I don’t know how she does it. London: Vintage. Petterson, Stephen M., and Alison Burke Albers. 2001. Effects of poverty and maternal depression on early child development. Child Development 72: 1794–1813. Picard, Anna. 2001. Could you too be a killer mummy. New Statesman 9: 29–30. Pullinger, Kate. 2004. A little stranger. London: Serpent’s Tail. Quiney (Cain), Ruth. 2007. Confessions of the new capitalist mother: Twenty-first century writing on the traumas of motherhood. Women: A Cultural Review 18 (1): 19–40. Reading, Richard, and Shirley Reynolds. 2001. Debt, social disadvantage, and maternal depression. Social Science and Medicine 53: 441–453. Rose, Nikolas. 1996. Psychiatry as a political science: Advanced liberalism and the administration of risk. History of the Human Sciences 9 (2): 1–23. Rose, Nikolas. 1998. Inventing our selves: Psychology, power, and personhood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rose, Nikolas. 1999a. Governing the soul: The shaping of the private self, 2nd ed. London and New York: Free Association Books. Rose, Nikolas. 1999b. Powers of freedom: Reframing political thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rose, Nikolas. 2007. The politics of life itself: Biomedicine, power, and subjectivity in the twenty-first century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sawicki, Jana. 1999. Disciplining mothers: Feminism and the new reproductive technologies. In Feminist theory and the body: A reader, ed. Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick, 190–202. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Schön, Regine A., and Maarit Silven. 2007. Natural parenting: Back to basics in infant care. Evolutionary Psychology 5 (1): 102–183. Sears, William, and Martha Sears. 2009. The attachment parenting book. Little, Brown: London. Segal, Lynne. 2007. Making trouble: Life and politics. London: Serpent’s Tail. Sichel, Deborah. 2003. Neurohormonal aspects of postpartum depression and psychosis. In Infanticide: Psychosocial and legal perspectives on mothers who kill, ed. Margaret G. Spinelli, 61–79. Washington: American Psychiatric Publishing. Silva, Elizabeth Bortolaia (ed.). 1996. Good enough mothering? Feminist perspectives on lone mothering. London: Routledge. Sheffield, Anne. 2000. Sorrow’s web: Overcoming the legacy of maternal depression. New York: Free Press. Shuttle, Penelope, and Peter Redgrove. 2005. The wise wound. London: Marion Boyars. Shriver, Lionel. 2006. We need to talk about Kevin. London: Serpent’s Tail. Smart, Carol. 1990. Law’s power, the sexed body, and feminist discourse. Journal of Law and Society 17: 194–210. Somerset, Wendy D., Jeffrey Newport, Kim Ragan, and Zachary N. Stowe. 2006. Depressive disorders in women: From menarche to beyond the menopause. In Women and depression, ed. Corey L.M. Keyes and Sherryl H. Goodman, 62–88. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stoppard, Janet L., and Linda M. McMullen (eds.). 2003. Situating sadness: Women and depression in social context. New York: New York University Press. Stoppard, Janet L., and Deanna L. Gammell. 2003. Depressed women’s treatment experiences: Exploring themes of medicalization and empowerment. In Situating sadness: Women and depression in social context, ed. Janet M. Stoppard and Linda M. McMullen, 39–61. New York: New York University Press. Steedman, Carolyn. 1986. Landscape for a good woman: A story of two lives. London: Virago. Thompson, Tracy. 2006. The ghost in the house: Mothers, children and depression. London: Piatkus. Ussher, Jane, 1991. Women’s madness: Misogyny or mental illness? London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Ussher, Jane. 1997. Body talk: The material and discursive regulation of sexuality, madness and reproduction. London: Routledge. Ussher, Jane. 2003. The role of pre menstrual dysphoric disorder in the subjectification of women. Journal of Medical Humanities 24 (1–2): 131–146. Warner, Judith. 2005. Perfect madness: Motherhood in the age of anxiety. London: Riverhead. Ward, Tony. 1999. The sad subject of infanticide: Law, medicine and child murder 1860–1938. Social and Legal Studies 8: 163–180. Wisner, Katherine L., Barbara L. Gracious, Catherine M. Piontek, Kathleen Peindl, and James M. Perel. 2003. Postpartum disorders: Phenomenology, treatment approaches, and relationship to infanticide. In Infanticide: Psychosocial and legal perspectives on mothers who kill, ed. Margaret G. Spinelli, 35–60. Washington: American Psychiatric Publishing. Wolf, Joan. 2007. Is breast really best? Risk and total motherhood in the national breastfeeding awareness campaign. Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 32: 595–636. Wolpert, Lewis. 2001. Malignant sadness: The anatomy of depression, 2nd ed. London: Faber.