Deciphering Difference: A Study in Medical Literacy

Abstract

As Leigh Wetherall-Dickson has shown in the previous chapter, coming to terms with oneself, especially through the medium of language, even within a private context, is a hazardous and painstaking enterprise, and one that is by no means guaranteed to end successfully. For those whose sense of self is clouded by doubts, self-recriminations and recurrent feelings of unworthiness, the process can involve an agonizingly long series of negotiations for which life itself, perhaps, provides insufficient time. This chapter seeks to place the quest for that elusive core of the depressive identity in terms of medical change, both the changes in medical practice between the eighteenth century and our own period, and also the changes in response that different medical approaches seem to have met with from patients then and now. This leads to the key question, both in this book and in terms of society’s attitudes towards its depressed individuals: how far were, and are, medical responses actually helping the ‘troubled in mind’, and how far were, and are, they actually contributing to the problem.