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Gender, Depression and Emotion: Arguing for a De-colonized Psychology

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Gender and Mental Health

Abstract

Depression is a ‘mood’ or ‘emotional disorder’. Underlying this naming, there are a set of universalizing colonial assumptions about women, their expressed emotions, and ‘disorders’ of the emotions. Two enlightenment ideas behind the western construal of emotions are questioned in the paper, from the gender/culture perspective: (1) emotion is (located) within the individual and (2) emotion is mental. These ideas are found in most ‘official’ therapies for depression. However, the indigenous view of emotions emphasizes the social and the embodied aspects of emotions. That is, emotion is in the body and is expressed through the body; and emotion is always in relation to the other, and often constructed with the other. The paper examines a few folk stories, and historically revered myths, including the Neeli myth from south India; the Kannagi story; and the more contemporary story of Rudali as illustrative. Women’s emotions are embodied expressions of distress; further, their object reference is to the other, often within contexts of patriarchal silencing and an extant milieu of violence. To naturalize emotions as a ‘problem’ is a colonial view, as a way of homogenizing and universalizing women’s experiences, to unify strategies of social control and control over women’s bodies.

I thank Prof. William Sax, and the University of Heidelberg for providing me with a one year Fellowship grant to explore the colonial aspects of psychology and psychiatry in India. This paper is drawn from research done on the grant, allowing me to travel and visit various libraries and archives in the country.

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  1. Bapu Trust for Research on Mind & Discourse, Pune, India

    Bhargavi V. Davar

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  1. Department of Social Work, University of Delhi, New Delhi, Delhi, India

    Meenu Anand

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Davar, B.V. (2020). Gender, Depression and Emotion: Arguing for a De-colonized Psychology. In: Anand, M. (eds) Gender and Mental Health. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5393-6_2

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