Living with Depression: Illness and Identity Turning Points

Abstract

This article reports on an in-depth interview investigation of 2O persons who have been diagnosed and treated for unipolar depression. The article proceeds from the observation that although a great deal of survey research has been directed at trying to understand the causes for depression, very little writing has explored the subjective experience of depression. The depression experience is conceived as a moving perspective or career through which persons try to make sense of their inherently ambiguous life condition. Analysis focuses on the major benchmarks in this career process. The key points in the career process are (a) having inchoate feelings of distress, (b) coming to feel that something is "really wrong," (c) having a crisis, (d) coming to grips with an illness identity, and sometimes (e) defining depression as a condition one can get past. Each of these stages corresponds to transformations in persons' self-conceptions.

Depression: Diagnosis and suffering as process

“…As Karp, very insightfully, has written, suffering from depression involves a number of identity turning points (Karp, 1994). Ones identity as a depressed person, then, is by no means static or linear but rather complex and changeable.…”

“…He thrived in school and with friends. But after having started in a new school, what Karp (1994) would refer to as an identity turning point, Henry became more and more isolated and marginalized from his classmates and from his social environment per se, leading to an experience of loneliness. At high school, things started to fall apart.…”

“…And hope is required. Because, as Karp (1994) hints at, an identity turning point can also go in the wrong direction. Things can actually get worse.…”

“…This is the perspective we take in this article. Hereby we are following in the footsteps of numerous researchers, for example Karp (1994) and Kokanowich, Bendelow and Philip (2013). But whereas Karp's study focuses on how living with depression represents an identity turning point for those who suffer, and Kokanowich et al focus their study on the ambivalence that occurs for those receiving and living with the diagnosis, our focus is somewhat different.…”

Deep brain stimulation, personal identity and policy

“…Karp (1994) conducted interviews with 20 people with depression, and outlined the stages of the disease from distress, to the sense that ' something ' s wrong ' , to crisis, to a narrative shift within the patient to a disease identity, and fi nally, hopefully, another shift that allows the patient to identify the depression as something from which she or he can emerge. Furthermore, treatment modality aside, the condition itself (e.g.…”