Depression – a socio-cultural way of manifesting women’s psychological crises

Abstract

In the context of the anthropology of health, in this article depression is discussed as the most common form of the manifestation of women’s psychological crises. The outline of the history of such crises indicates that we should search for commonalities between depression and hysteria in the comprehension and understanding of the phenomenon as well as in the reinforcement of the unequal relation between the genders and stigmatisation. The classic feminist theoretical starting points for the understanding of women’s social status in this article are completed by the analysis of ethnographic material that illustrates and confirms the theoretical statements about the androcentric construction of the modern Slovenian social space and the relations in it.