I have just read an extract from Emma Forrest’s book Your Voice in My Head in yesterday’s Guardian http://bit.ly/dKlamU. The book is published by Bloomsbury on 17th of Jan and gives an account of this successful female journalist’s battle with depression.
What struck me immediately about this article is the wistful glamour that the author effortlessly attaches to her illness. Accounts of bulimia and suicide take place against a backdrop of quirky downtown New York and relationships with high profile film stars. The accompanying image depicts a beautiful young woman in a gorgeous yellow dress, her serious facial expression subtly alluding to the strain that her suicidal depression and self harm have caused her.
It seems to me that public representations of depression often take on this kind of glamorous form, especially when it comes to depression in women. Books like Shoot the Damn Dog written by Sally Brampton (former editor of Vogue) are often set against a background of wealth and resources that make the passage from symptom to diagnosis, treatment and cure a little more fluid. Sally Brampton says at one point toward the end of her book “money is there to be spent,” a phrase that affirms her assured capability to pay for therapy in order to overcome her (admittedly horrendous) symptoms. I can’t help question how this very one sided depiction of depression in women, might impact on the public’s perception of mental health issues.
In August 2010 Janet Street Porter published an horrendously foolish article in the Daily Mail, which leveled the claim that depression was the new trendy illness in rich women. http://bit.ly/atC8MA Her claims included the assertion that women from poor backgrounds are simply too preoccupied with poverty and overwork to allow the word depression to enter their vocabulary. Only rich women, she concluded, have time to be depressed.
While I utterly refute Porter’s claims and believe depression to be a serious health issue, her article does seem symptomatic of the current popular discourse around depression. We hear multitudes about depression survivors like Emma Forrest who battle with the depressive mindset in pretty dresses and high heals. Yet we hear considerably less about underprivileged women who bring up children in tiny council houses and are never diagnosed as depressives because they have too many other health and life issues to contend with first.
I’m very excited about the new direction that I have identified for my MA research and how I might be able to evidence some other platform for public perceptions of mental health issues, that oppose this glamorous female surviver model. My decision to look at artists making alternative archives of mental health symptoms, allows me to think about how other perspectives might be illuminated for a public audience. Its curious how the issue of gender looms large here and that I am proposing to focus on the experiences of men. I know that I people keep questioning the gender aspect of my proposal, but somehow the singular feminine perspective evidenced in books like Emma Forrest’s continue to serve as testimony to its relevance.
