Are We Medicalizing Women’s Misery? A Critical Review of Women’s Higher Rates of Reported Depression

Abstract

Epidemiological research consistently reports that women experience higher rates of depression than men. Competing biomedical, psychological and sociocultural models adopt a realist epistemology and a discourse of medical naturalism to position depression as a naturally occurring pathology within the woman, caused by biology, cognitions or life stress. Feminist critics argue that this medicalizes women’s misery, legitimizes expert intervention, and negates the political, economic and discursive aspects of experience. However, the alternative model of social constructionism may appear to dismiss the ‘real’ of women’s distress, and deny its material and intrapsychic concomitants, as well as negate relevant research findings. A critical review of sociocultural and psychological research on women’s depression is conducted. It is argued that a critical-realist epistemology allows us to acknowledge the material-discursive-intrapsychic concomitants of experiences constructed as depression, without privileging one level of analysis above the other, in order to understand women’s higher rates of reported depression.