Silencing the Self: Women and Depression

By Dana Crowley Jack

Book Overview

Dana Crowley Jack offers startling new insights into the roots of female depression as she illuminates why women are far more likely than men to suffer major depression in adulthood. Silencing the Self is the first sweeping overview of depression in women that draws on new understandings of the importance of relationships in women's lives. Attending closely to what depressed women have to say about their lives, Jack reframes major concepts of depression, freeing them from traditional models that have restricted our ability to listen to women's perspectives on depression. Jack weaves these voices of depressed women directly into her discussion, providing new meanings to familiar themes: dependence, pleasing, anger, goodness, low self-esteem. These women clearly articulate a no-win, either/or tension in their lives, a tension between sacrificing their own needs in order to preserve a relationship and acting on their needs and feelings at the risk of losing the relationship. Their stories bring to light the "activity required to be passive"--the way women actively silence themselves in order to cultivate and maintain intimate relationships. To accommodate, they learn to censor themselves, to devalue their experience, to repress anger, to be silent. Examining moral themes in depressed women's narratives, Jack demonstrates how internalized cultural expectations of feminine goodness affect women's behavior in relationships and precipitate the plunge into depression. In a brilliant synthesis, Jack draws on myth and fairy tale for metaphors to further the understanding of depressed women. Silencing the Self makes a major contribution to the psychology of women by drawing from the recent literature on women's relational self and detailing its relevance to female depression. This insightful approach to the dynamic of female depression forges new pathways to self-change, therapy, and research.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674808150
• ISBN13: 9780674808157
• Release Date: October 1991
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 1.12 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.9" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

Depressed women

It is well established from epidemiological studies that women suffer more depressive illness than men. Housebound housewives have a specially high amount of depression. Men commit suicide more often and are more ptone to alcoholism. A number of theories have been suggested to account for these facts. Jack reviews some of the psychological theories (none of the biological ones) and presents her own theory that the depression is the result of women's indoctrination to self-effacement and low self-esteem (This is an over-simplification, and you'd have to read the book to do her ideas full justice). She supports her thesis by a two year study of twelve depressed women. She did not have a control group. I don't see why not. It could be that she wanted to concentrate on the individuals' feelings in a non-quantitative way, but she does present a questionnaire and some statistics. Nevertheless the interviews and case studies are well done and helpful to anyone interested in depression. Her recommended psychotherapy methods (medication is barely mentions) seem to be what is sometimes called dialectical or cognitive. Again you'd need a control group to prove treatment effectiveness. As a self-help book for depressed patients themselves. I think it's a little too densely written. The writing is good and lucid, but someone in the throes of a severe depression would find trouble following it. Relatives of depressed women, especially husbands, might benefit more but this is not one of the depression books I would highly recommend to non-professionals. Prodessionals who work with depression and students who are interested in cognitive and dialectical approaches with (ok - now it comes) a feminist slant should find it useful and highly readable.

Excellent for women to re-discover who they were and can be!

An opportunity for women to put the pieces of thier lives together to form a complete picture of themselves. Offers others' lives to identify with through thier experiences. Also presents an opportunity to recognize that society plays a major role in women's self-distortion. If one can make it through the first chapter, the rest is easy!