Women's mental health : a critique of hetero-patriarchal power and pathologization

This chapter provides a searing critique of medical and psychological explanations for women’s higher rates of reported depression. Through a feminist intersectional lens, the chapter conceptualizes depression as a reasonable response, located in gendered oppression within cis-hetero-patriarchal culture, not a reflection of pathology within. The chapter explores the roots of women’s distress in inequality, discrimination, and violence, combined with the constraints of gendered roles. At the same time, psychiatric diagnosis is deconstructed as a practice that pathologizes femininity. The chapter concludes that we need to address the social and political context of women’s distress and challenge the medicalization of misery, where women who experience problems with everyday life are defined as having a mental illness, “depression,” and prescribed medication as the only solution.