Is the personal (bio)political in the digital age?: Feminism, depression and the troubling of neuro selfhood by Professor Simone Fullagar - a presentation from the symposium on social movements and their contributions to sociological knowledge on mental health at the University of Wolverhampton. Held on 13 June 2014.

1. Is the personal (bio)political in the digital age?:
Feminism, depression and the troubling of
neuro selfhood
Prof. Simone Fullagar
https://bath.academia.edu/SimoneFullagar
Twitter @simonefullagar
s.p.fullagar@bath.ac.uk
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
University of Bath

2. Questions
• How does the feminist ethos ‘the personal is
political’ play out within the biopolitics of
depression and through digital spaces?
• What discursive formations are shaping feminist
debates about mental health/illness?
• What might be the effects on how we come to
‘know’ women’s experiences & lives?
• Points of tension and alliance exist between
feminist and mental health movements?
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3. The historical,
political and cultural
construction of
gendered
subjectivity.
Women positioned
as hysterical,
emotional,
hormonal & now
neurochemcially
unbalanced
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4. Feminist Counter-Discourses
• Early women’s movement – mind doctors as
agents of patriarchal control (Freidan, Greer,
Millet)
• Medicalisation of women’s emotional distress
(diagnosis) critiqued within medical
institutions/practices (Appignanesi, 2009)
• Exposing the power-knowledge relations of
‘scientific expertise’ that defined women as ‘ill or
mad’ (Usher, 2000)
• Women’s movement articulates social
understanding of personal struggles
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5. Gendered ‘mental health and behavioural conditions’ (ABS,
2012) 5
‘Unipolar depression, predicted to be the second leading
cause of global disability burden by 2020, is twice as
common in women…(and) more persistent in women than
men’ (WHO, 2014)
http://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/genderwomen/en/

6. – Mental health literacy is a population problem as
‘people don’t understand’ they need expert help
(Jorm et al 2007)
– E-mental health promotion to educate women
treats gender as a ‘variable’ not a social
construct (Fullagar, 2008)
– Rise of social media & digital communication
enables dialogue about the intersectionality of
women’s subjectivities
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Depression is more than just a low mood –
it's a serious illness that has an impact on
both physical and mental health.

7. Cultural critique, Artist, Justine Cooper
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Celebrity advocacy,
Ruby Wax “It’s a brain disease.
Depression has nothing to do with being
sad. It’s not because you had a bad hair
day or even that your husband left
town,” she says. “I’m trying to break that
myth as fast as I can. I can only say it a
hundred thousand times.”
Ruby Wax ‘poster girl
for mental health,
2013’, positivenews

8. Rise of neurochemical selfhood
(Rose, 2007; Rose & Abi-Rached, 2013)
• Neuroscience as the new ‘truth’ about depression
via hypothesis of chemical imbalance in the brain
– Persists despite lack of evidence & critique, similar
effects to placebo (Moncrieff, 2009)
– Illness identity ‘legitimises’ emotional distress but can
worsen social stigma (Lafrance, 2012; Buchan et al,
2013)
– ‘Good women’ are urged to govern themselves as expert
consumers to be responsible & restore normality
(Stoppard, 1999; Trivelli 2014)
– ‘Pharmaceutical imaginary’ (Jenkins, 2010) has a
gendered history: hysterical, neurotic woman, unhappy
housewife (valium), unsatisifed working mothers (SSRIs)
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9. Digital spaces, fluid assemblages
The Fementalists: At the intersection of feminism
and mental health activism, http://thefementalists.com/about/
Facebook and twitter accounts, forum and blog
• This site was established to bridge the gap between mental health
activism and feminism, and to provide a space for women to share
their experiences of life at the intersection of womanhood and mental
ill-health. We are committed to an intersectional feminist analysis and
are firm advocates for patients’ rights.
7/10/2013 3:11 pm
Women with severe mental health problems
are 10x more likely to be attacked, less likely
to report independent.co.uk/life-style/hea…
@TheFementalists
1/02/2014 1:52 am
How many of us have had our voices
discounted because of our diagnoses?
"Oh, you're upset? You must be off your
meds." #NotHysterical

10. A Room of Our Own: Feminist tensions
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@ThisisLauraS
1/02/2014 12:22 am
A lot of the movement makes
me feel like a failure for my
struggles because I don't fit
the "strong" narrative.
#NotHysterical
@UnusedPotential
31/01/2014 11:43 pm
Mental health issues often make
people incapable of advocating
for themselves. We need the
voices of wider feminism.
#NotHysterical
http://www.crunkfeministcollective.com/2010/08/30/life-is-not-
a-fairytale-black-women-and-depression/
This feels like a confession because while I am only
admitting to having moments of humanity and
vulnerability, I am a black woman, and for me these
realities are oftentimes seen as weaknesses. We
(black women) are supposed to be strong. We (black
women) are not supposed to break down.

11. Blog - Feminism, Mental Health and Inclusion by
@LUBottom http://aroomofourown.org/feminism-
mental-health-and-inclusion-by-lubottom/
28/4/2014
• What I wanted to write about is my particular experience
with depression and why I take issue with it being co-opted
as a term to describe non-medical annoyance or frustration
and why non-disabled feminists need to make more careful
choices regarding the words they use…
• On the one hand my instinct is to ignore the word
“depressing” as something which has become deeply
assimilated into our everyday conversations, but on the
other I am aware of the hypocrisy of ignoring such terms
whilst feeling offend by the use of other medical terms
such as “schizophrenic” or “retarded” as adjectives for
negative terminology.
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12. How is depression rendered thinkable
as a feminist problem?
• Othering of MH difference: Feminist
language can trivalise experience of
‘depression’
– ‘the use of “how depressing” is an insult’
• Feminist subjectivity normalised as strong
in relation to the fight against oppression
– emotional ‘weakness’ as a source of shame
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13. Mumsnet: BBC report on NICE advice on AD
risks for pregnant women
• “You’ve got double the risk. And for women who are mild
to moderately depressed, I don’t think that those risks, in
most cases, are really worth taking” he said.
“It’s not just when a woman who’s pregnant is sitting in
front of you. I think it needs to be thought about with a
woman who could get pregnant. And, that’s the large
majority of women aged between 15 and 45″
• Prof Pilling, NICE
http://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/a1787715-Gobsmacked-at-
SSRI-pregnancy-thing-as-reported-on-BBC-today
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14. • “OK, I too fumed at this article, because of the assumption that women’s
mental health was trivial and unimportant compared to that of their
hypothetical unborn baby, thus making us seem like incubators on legs
(once more)”.
“Bafflingly, I have yet to see an article on the BBC warning pre-
inseminating men who are suffering mild to moderate depression not to
use SSRIs for this reason”.
• I saw that this morning. Found it disturbing on several levels. Lets make
women even more responsible for their own mental health. Let them
make impossible choices through pregnancy so we can blame it all on
them rather than actually looking at what is wrong with the society that
this is actually so much of a danger for pregnant women. And don't get
me started on the pre-pregnancy guff. Are women to be permanently in a
state of pre-pregnancy when they reach puberty? It is controlling and
sinister.
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Women’s minds/bodies as the object of expertise:

15. The ‘right to choose’ neurochemcial selfhood but…
• I completely agree with lots of the stuff on here about his comments
being ill-judged, and seemingly anti-women. I am on SSRIs, have
been for many years, believe they have sorted me out. Generally, I am
a big defender of pharmacological agents for depression. I have
practically rattled at times. However.... and I just can't shake this 'what
if' feeling... SSRIs have been linked to higher rates of heart defects.
Presumably the studies demonstrating this have been adequately
controlled for other comorbid factors.
• I'm on an SNRI. It works brilliantly for my anxiety and depression, but
the withdrawals... I wouldn't recommend them to anyone on that basis
(google FDA discontinuation syndrome cymbalta).
• Paroxetine, the SSRI they mention in the report, is also known as
Seroxat. It took years of dogged campaigning (and legal action) to
make the manufacturers and the psychiatrists admit that Seroxat was
actually linked to an increased risk of suicide in some patients,
especially young people.
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16. Digital civic actions of feminists: ‘troubling’ relations
between ‘mental health’ discourses
• sharing of women’s diverse experiences to reveal the
interrelations between social, personal and neurobiological
• Raise questions the inclusiveness of feminist politics (in
terms of mental health identity /language that marginalises)
• Facilitate critical responses to dominant truths (celebrities,
policy, NICE) that shape public knowledge
• Challenges from here;
– understanding how the circumstances affecting mental health are
social/gendered,
– the normalisation of neurochemical selfhood & lack of alternatives
– engagement of critical voices with mainstream mental health
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17. • Fullagar, S., & O’Brien, W. (2013). Problematizing the neurochemical subject of anti-
depressant treatment: The limits of biomedical responses to women’s emotional distress.
Health:, 17(1), 57-74.
• Fullagar, S and O’Brien, W (2012) Journeys, battles & feeling alive: Metaphors of women’s
recovery from depression, Qualitative Health Research
• Fullagar, S (2009) Negotiating the neurochemical self: Anti-depressant consumption in
women’s recovery from depression, Health: An interdisciplinary journal for the social study of
health, illness and medicine. 13(3), pp.389-406.
• O’Brien & Fullagar (2008) Women’s recovery from depression, Social Alternatives, (special
issue on mental health), 24(4), pp.6-13
• Fullagar, S. (2008) Sites of somatic subjectivity: E-scaped mental health promotion and the
biopolitics of depression, Social Theory and Health, 6, pp.323-341.
• Fullagar, S. (2008) Leisure practices as counter-depressants: Emotion-work and emotion-play
within women’s recovery from depression, Leisure Sciences: An Interdisciplinary Journal.
30(1), pp.35-52.
• Gattuso, S, Fullagar, S and Young, I. (2005). Speaking of women’s ‘nameless misery’: The
everyday construction of depression within Australian women’s magazines. Social Science
and Medicine. 61(8), pp. 1640-1648
• Fullagar, S & Brown, P. (2003) Everyday temporalities: Leisure, ethics and young women’s
emotional well-being. Annals of Leisure Research. 6(3), pp.193-208.
• Fullagar, S and Gattuso, S. (2002). Rethinking gender, risk and depression within Australian
mental health policy. Australian e-Journal for the Advancement of Mental Health.
http://www.auseinet.com/journal/
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