2
break from this links, and in fact are bred from a cultural comfort with depression.
Specifically, the paper addresses new self-diagnostic practices and new diagnoses created
outside of the psychiatry community, suggesting that these indicate a growing cultural
comfort with the pathologization of female gender disrupting behavior.
Expanding Demographics, Constant Symptoms
Despite its goal to accurately determine the rates of mental illness and those in
treatment in the US, a 1980 NIMH-funded ECA study (Epidemiological Catchment Area)
produced a troubled report that avoided any collection of risk factors.
1
Because sexism in
statistical collection and diagnostic practice is naturalized and invisible, such research has
becomes an acceptable, repeated component of psychiatric practices. Today, with
national and industry policy calling for increased diagnosis extending across class and
race boundaries to so-called populations at-risk, more females find themselves deemed at
risk and diagnosed with depression or depression-linked disorders. The latest group to
enter the fold are poor female children and adolescents particularly those receiving State
health care, who are increasingly diagnosed with “attention-deficit, hyperactivity
disorder” and treated with Prozac and other antidepressants, allegedly to stabilize their
moods. The study notes an alarming trend of increased pharmaceutical prescriptions for
children, particularly among poor children receiving Medicaid health benefits. (Goode
2000) The targeting of young, poor, female children for diagnosis and the liberal use of
1
The ECA study proved no better in accuracy—the budget-cutting Reagan administration approved the
study only because it avoided “social problem” rhetoric, and was presented as a scientific study that simply
counted the diseased. (Kutchins and Kirk, 1991) As a result research on race, racism and risk factors were
avoided in the study. Racism has been documented in the practice of assigning disorders, where minority
subjects were diagnosed as much more severely ill than white subjects with the exact case study; the first
were diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenic, the latter with paranoid personality disorder. (Kutchins and
Kirk, 1991)
Convention