"I did sink but I didn't drown": acceptance, meaning and identity in narratives of depression

Abstract

This thesis is based on interviews with eight people about their everyday experiences of depression. Despite the increasing presence of depression in public health discourse, and a vast amount of clinical research, the first person perspective of depression is noticeably lacking from the academic literature, and within the popular media. Utilising a grounded theory approach, this thesis attempts to rectify this imbalance by presenting the depression narratives of four women and four men living in Wellington, New Zealand. These personal narratives reveal that people living with depression enact discourses from a great variety of complex and multifaceted sources. The prevailing 'mental illness' discourse of depression is fused with discourses that normalise the experience in people's lives, thus going far beyond the biomedical and biopsychosocial models that currently dominate, showing depression to be heterogeneous, contradictory and ambiguous. People's narratives show an understanding of depression that changes and evolves in conjunction with, and in response to, the broader personal and social contexts of their everyday lives. The ongoing and shifting process of making sense of plausible causes and effective coping strategies are explored, as are articulations of meaningful aspects of the experience. These are all fundamental components of the depression experience implying significant identity work on the part of the people concerned, and eventually impact on their interpretations of what depression is, their sense of self as someone living with depression, and their future. Ultimately, personal narratives add considerably to our overall discursive possibilities in conceptualising and articulating experiences of depression.