A History of the Definition and Diagnosis of Postpartum Depression as a Disease

University Of North Texas, Denton TX

Investigators

Abstract

This award supports a project in the history of science that analyzes the production and proliferation of the disease concept of postpartum depression in the United States during the second half of the twentieth century. It traces the mobilization of medical, popular, and political languages of postpartum depression (depression with onset in the year following childbirth) as a means by which different groups defined the normal and abnormal postpartum. The research will engage in archival research and oral histories; the analysis of these sources will be guided by the theorization of diseases of risk, somatic citizenship, and gender, emotion and embodiment. The results of this research will be published as a book that will interest physicians, psychiatrists, and others interested in maternal mental health. Transcripts of oral histories with actors involved in the codification of postpartum depression as a distinct disease will be made available for future researchers interested in women's health activism and mental health politics. The researcher will also design a course for upper-level undergraduates focusing on gender and mental health, and she will engage in public outreach through op-eds in national newspapers and women's health publications that will translate this work to a general public. This research project on the history of postpartum depression will take a critical perspective in considering how different actors participated in the politics of diagnosis and the search for causes and solutions within a layered political context. The primary product of this research, a monograph, will consider these questions within a broader framework of gendered risk. The project converses directly with literatures of women's health, mental health, and 20th century U.S. politics. Contributions include an examination of how maternal risk and child development literature shaped the construction of maternal mental health, a nuanced investigation of the gendered national politics of the late-20th century as they led multiple groups to accept etiologies of postpartum depression that served their own aims, and an investigation into disease construction and risk in this specifically gendered and familial disease. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.