Life Illness. Depression and the Accounts of Everyday Life

Abstract

In the previous chapter I explored the relationship between the discursively constructed self and depression men suffer from. It turned out that the self is situated outside the illness. Whether the self was backgrounded, or the speaker took the position of an observer or, finally, undermined the illness itself, depression was always detached from, never experienced directly in, the men’s narratives. With some reservations, I located the roots of these constructions in gender ideologies, which lay out a host of expectations of what it means to be a man. Being depressed is not one of these. In this chapter I am continuing the exploration of the discourse of the depressed self.