scholarly journals Predictors of psychological distress in low‐income mothers over the first postpartum year

2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 205-216 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harry Adynski ◽  
Catherine Zimmer ◽  
John Thorp ◽  
Hudson P Santos
Keyword(s):  
Psychological Distress ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Low Income Mothers

The melancholy of murderous mothers: Depression and the medicalization of women’s anger

2014 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 461-478 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lou-Marie Kruger ◽  
Kirsten van Straaten ◽  
Laura Taylor ◽  
Marleen Lourens ◽  
Carla Dukas
Keyword(s):  
Psychological Distress ◽  
South African ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Adverse Conditions ◽  
Explicit Content ◽  
Low Income Mothers

Informed by recent feminist critiques of the notion of depression, we explored how a group of South African low-income mothers who have been diagnosed with depression subjectively describe and explain their psychological distress. Working within a feminist materialist-discursive framework, we focused both on the explicit content of what the women were saying and on the implicit or underlying discourses that informed their narratives. Our findings suggest that respondents often subjectively experienced their psychological distress as anger, which was also articulated in violence directed at their children. This suggests that not only does the diagnosis of depression serve to medicalize the distress of participants, but it may simultaneously serve to obscure their anger at having to mother in adverse conditions. In exploring reasons for their anger, we found that participants were frustrated with trying to live up to idealized notions of motherhood in impoverished contexts.

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