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indicates the use of similar “symptoms” to frame women as behaviorally and thus
mentally deviant. State and NGO mental health campaigns as well as
psychopharmaceutical advertisements have worked efficiently to equate women’s
sadness, lethargy, and domestic non-productivity with mental disorder. Common
symptoms are clearly features of a range of women’s disorders since 19
th
century
hysteria, 20
th
century neurosis, personality disorders and signify today’s eating and
anxiety disorders, and depression. This repetition of symptoms seems to have
successfully embedded this symptom-disorder linkage in the public mind. But the
repeated framing of certain symptoms as female disorders is easily discernible and many
laypersons can critique that process. I am concerned with the less discernible products
made possible by this historic process. Indeed, there are new “technologies” of diagnosis
occurring in the social/private arena since depression has been linked to other female
disorders. New types of informal diagnoses are being constructed in the public arena by
laypersons and talk show hosts. Women commonly self-diagnose and self-treat their
“symptoms” and increasingly the risk of symptom formation I diagnosed by “experts”
and laypersons. These activities constitute new “technologies” that indicate powerful
insidious new practices of self-scrutiny and self-governance.
Menses to Motherhood; the Broadening of Mental Illness with Depression
New types of depression-linked diagnoses are produced today by non-
professional self-help and media personalities. Foucault (1976) showed that new
sciences of sexuality in fact deployed discourses of sexuality, creating public testimony
and further demarcating the confines of normal sexual behavior in the social. In the late
20th century, the new science of behavior has elaborated popular, media discussions of
Convention