Depression: A Public Feeling

by Ann Cvetkovich

In Depression: A Public Feelings Project, Ann Cvetkovich combines memoir and critical essay in search of ways of writing about depression as a cultural and political phenomenon that offer alternatives to medical models. She describes her own experience of the professional pressures, creative anxiety, and political hopelessness that led to intellectual blockage while she was finishing her dissertation and writing her first book. Building on the insights of the memoir, in the critical essay she considers the idea that feeling bad constitutes the lived experience of neoliberal capitalism.

Cvetkovich draws on an unusual archive, including accounts of early Christian acedia and spiritual despair, texts connecting the histories of slavery and colonialism with their violent present-day legacies, and utopian spaces created from lesbian feminist practices of crafting. She herself seeks to craft a queer cultural analysis that accounts for depression as a historical category, a felt experience, and a point of entry into discussions about theory, contemporary culture, and everyday life. Depression: A Public Feeling suggests that utopian visions can reside in daily habits and practices, such as writing and yoga, and it highlights the centrality of somatic and felt experience to political activism and social transformation.

Genres: Nonfiction, Psychology, Mental Health, Theory, Memoir, Queer, Philosophy

296 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Ann Cvetkovich is Ellen C. Garwood Centennial Professor of English and Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Texas, Austin. She is the author of Depression: A Public Feeling, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures, and Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism; a coeditor of Political Emotions; and a former editor of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.

Reviews

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating, necessary analysis and memoir about depression. Ann Cvetkovich, a professor of English and Gender Studies at the University of Texas, integrates the critical essay and memoir genres to explore her own experience with depression. She also examines why so many academics, activists, and others in positions of privilege face this onslaught of negative/debilitating feeling. From the beginning, she argues against the biomedical model of depression, while acknowledging that it may help some who suffer. A meaningful passage that analyzes the medical model:

"Within the popular imaginary, the medical model also holds powerful sway, especially the rhetoric that depression, pervasive though it might be, is manageable because it is a disease that can be detected, diagnosed, and treated. Although significantly bolstered by powerful economic and institutional interests, this commonsense understanding has widespread popular appeal particularly because a medical model based on biology relieves people of individual blame or responsibility and makes for a tangible set of solutions that contrast with the overwhelming, diffuse, and messy tendencies of social or cultural analysis."

As an aspiring psychologist, I appreciated Cvetkovich's courage in criticizing the medical model. Yes, if we view depression as a brain disease, we alleviate blame from those who experience it. But why must something have a biological root for us to practice compassion toward it? And why do we not target the causes of depression we can change, such as capitalism and racism? I applaud Cvetkovich for her intelligent and nuanced discussion of how depression can arise from consistently feeling overworked and underappreciated, from living in a country that does not value you because of your skin color, etc. Though her analysis sometimes veers into territories of obscure intellectualism, it brings forth nuggets of wisdom that more doctors, psychologists, and writers should take into account. One longer passage about academic over-extension that resonated with me:

"O'Brien stresses the crushing pressures of the American dream and the need to disengage from its demands for visible forms of success. As she explores the significance of Harvard, which 'symbolizes, concentrates, expects, and venerates the pressure to achieve,' in both her father's and her own life, she comes to question how the 'link between depression and seeking external approval' has governed her academic life. Seeking to turn from scholarship to more creative kinds of writing, she finds a way out of depression by detaching herself from this capitalist emphasis on the pressure to make one's identity around dissertations, books, and other markers of productivity... she suggests that depression can be seen as 'an unconscious form of resistance to the work ethic' and seeks stories that might embrace this not as failure or weakness but as a strong choice. 'I'm working on finding a new story for my life, a story that gives me hope but doesn't require the happy ending of recovery. This is a struggle in America, a culture that celebrates and practically requires individual achievement, a culture where we don't have enough stories for imagining lives that do not fit, in one way or another, the success plot.'"

Overall, I enjoyed reading this book because of Cvetkovich's innovative and insightful perspective on depression, as well as her courage for sharing her story in a society that pressures academics and professionals to appear infallible. As an Asian American, I found her discussion of white supremacy a bit lacking. Though she kind of acknowledges her privilege as a white woman, she could have incorporated more research and room for her discussion about race. Still, I found Depression: A Public Feeling a worthwhile read in that it encourages us to view our emotions as valid and even helpful, if we can work to dismantle the oppressive systems that harm us. Recommended to those who want an intellectual yet open critical essay/memoir about depression.

[Quin Rich · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am deeply conflicted about this book. On the one hand, Cvetkovich's analysis is insightful, fulfilling, and came to me at precisely the right time in my life. On the other hand, at several points throughout the text Cvetkovich minimizes the very real world-historical force of white supremacy. Even when she directly discusses racism as a form of everyday trauma, she equates white/settle guilt with the lived and historical experiences of racism. She also basically dismisses the idea of cultural appropriation because, if I read her correctly, some white folks feel better after doing yoga and meditating. While this may be true, it disregards the impact this has on subordinated communities having their cultural traditions commodified and appropriated by white elites.

That said, Cvetkovich use of a queer, feminist archive and location depression as a queer academic were both very personally relevant, and made reading this book for the most part quite rewarding. I had to play Peter Elbow's "Believing Game" at times to get through her white ignorance (as a white person I recognize I am also subject to this critique, but that doesn't justify Cvetkovich on this). However, formulating a concept of "political depression" to be lived with via "the utopia of everyday habit" gave me new hope that, even if depression is to be a regular feature of my life, that doesn't mean I have nothing to live for. There are paths through it.

In sum, Cvetkovich's book will likely speak to white, middle class, queer, feminist aspiring academics (like me), with other folks feeling skeptical at best. Take it for what it's worth, and let it help you through the despair.

[Connor · Rating 1 out of 5]

she really hates when depressed people take prozac... slay? or not slay?

[Jason · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wasn't persuaded by the memoir section of this book, but there were a handful of interesting ideas that I'll take with me.

[Peter Landau · Rating 4 out of 5]

Say no to drugs, except when your depressed? I've self-medicated and I've had a doctor's hand on the mortar and pestle with equal results. And the answer, for me, is that depression is a rational response to life. It's sad, and then it's not, and then it is again. So what? Life doesn't care, and neither should you. Cvetkovich doesn't deny the dismal aspects of life nor does she dismiss the joy inherent in the living, but she, through various, mostly queer-culture examples, shows that the value of living is accepting and processing all emotions, and not trying to cherry-pick your feelings. She finds the sacred in the mundane, everyday, being able to show up for the good, bad and indifferent, equally. There's no cure for depression, just as there's no cure for life, you live through it and you live it. While not completely dismissive of medication, her filter of depression through a non-medical lens is eyeopening and needed. This is the most uplifting book about being down I've yet to read.

[clare · Rating 1 out of 5]

I’m going to start by saying that I was very excited to read this book, as I loved An Archive of Feeling. I used Cvetkovich’s work in my own research when I was in school. This book was ultimately a disappointment, though, and I did not finish it.

While the premise of the argument sounds great in theory, it fails in practice. This is less of a scholarly interrogation of depression under capitalism and more of a polemic against pharmaceuticals (“the demon Prozac,” pg. 59). The author’s dissatisfaction with psychiatric care seems to be the undercurrent that fueled this entire project.

This part is really what angered me:
“There really was a solution to my problem, and it made my despair seem like it had an understandable cause. I am convinced that depression is like this - that there are real and possible solutions for the problems that ail us. There is nothing wrong with our biology or our intelligence; sometimes we are just stuck.” This frames depression as a personal failing and something that one can “solve” if one works hard enough. This is incredibly harmful rhetoric, especially for someone in her position to be touting. This is why I did not finish the book (but Goodreads made me mark it as finished in order to leave a review).

There is also little to no attention to her own whiteness throughout the book. She adopts culturally appropriative practices (the entirety of page 52 - “Then came hints of voodoo,” and the whole section on the Virgen de Guadalupe, as well as pages 70 and 71 about her “ancestral home”) and assumes authority on topics (“I gave the paper on Madonna, race, and voguing,” pg.63), centering her queerness as her excuse. She is even conscious of it (“Although I felt self-conscious about being yet another white girl appropriating other cultures,” pg. 52), but is not self-critical. Not a great look.

Not so much a critique of the book, but an observation: As someone who has been manic, I personally was put off by her romanticization of manic behavior in the memoir section. What a privilege it is that mania did not destroy her life, as it so often does for others (and, as she noted, her father). Incredible.

As I said, I am quite disappointed in a scholar I had so much respect for previously. If I was still in academia I would not cite her again. How upsetting.

[Lzz · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was more invested in this book for its connections between political feelings, memoir/description, and the somatic/affective experience of depression that I was for the extended dives into literary and historical analyses of works (mainly literature and art) about depression. I found the etymological genealogies a lot more interesting than I was expecting-- really made me stop and think about how taken-for-granted ideas and even specific words are to me, when it comes to depression. For instance, 'acedia' and 'melancholia' have divergent histories in relation to 'mental health'/depression, but how much of that divergence (and, thus, presupposed usefulness of those words) is dictated by sanist/ableist logics and establishments? Cvetkovich argues, A lot! So she made me reflect a great deal on the language I use, personally, to talk/think about (especially my own) depression, how much of it is medicalized and arises from the medical establishment. Thanks to this book, I am fired up to dig more into the sociopolitical/culture causes of depression and the everyday experience of depression.

However... (You knew this was coming.) Reading the chapter about racism and depression made me exceedingly uncomfortable. It's not just because she is white and privileged (she's an elite academic), it was especially because I, too, have seen many connections between racism, colonialism, and depression...and reading her take on these connections made it crystal clear to me how sensitive one has to be with that material. In fact, having read this (and I'm gonna go ahead and say Cvetkovich is a better writer than me), I would venture to say that white people have no business analyzing and writing about these very personal, very affecting subjects-- at least not in the way that she did (solo authored, for-profit monograph). I dunno. I have very mixed feelings about it. I just feel like it's a huge privilege to take people of colour's work (and memoirs are especially sensitive), use POC thought frameworks, analyze and talk about it...Feels almost like talking about someone while they're within ear shot but you assume they're not going to take part in the conversation. Feels...secondhand. Feels appropriative. I dunno. Feel free to give your two cents.

[Liza · Rating 5 out of 5]

A queer academic self-help book! That is what Ann Cvetkovich said she "kind of jokingly" called this project, but I think it's for real. My boss lent me this along with Lynda Barry's Cruddy and Beth Ditto's memoir, which I think make good companion pieces. By the time I was about a third of the way through, I had forcibly recommended this book to almost everyone I know, but two thirds of the way in I got completely bogged down. Maybe that's fitting?

[Boka]

trigger warning for overworked academics. also: knit a blanket with all that mental floss

[Annmarie · Rating 5 out of 5]

So, so, SO GOOD. This books look at depression's dual nature as both cultural/social and deeply personal and resists the desire to concoct narratives about depression that try to pathologize it. The book's genre switches between personal memoir, self-help, and cultural criticism in a way that is refreshing for academic scholarship.

[ra]

read this to potentially use in an essay + what you might expect when white women write about depression (especially re: white people doing yoga/engaging in "eastern" spirituality) but overall it was fine. nothing particularly new if you're already well-versed in sedgwick's reparative reading essay

[laurenhoweird · Rating 4 out of 5]

i worship ann cvetkovich

[Mynt Marsellus · Rating 5 out of 5]

While I was certainly left wanting more explanation of those things that I feel all the time, what this book leaves me with is the hope of living an ordinary life.

[aerialxav]

Introduction, chapter 3

[Duke Press]

“Cvetkovich offers us an introduction to thinking critically about depression's causes and its manifestations as well as, perhaps, the localised tactics that are necessary to enable recovery. At the end, she turns rather sweetly to crafting as one reparative habit, partly because of the aesthetic of connectivity that it can stimulate. Knitting yourself out of depression: it's kind of folksy, but I liked it.”--Sally Munt, Times Higher Education

“At one end, Depression is a call to expand how we frame and engage with depression, and at the other it’s an internal appeal to academia to accept personal experience as a valid source material for scholarship. By melding the personal and the academic, Cvetkovich is creating an important new forum for how we discuss depression. . . . The material is totally fascinating. . . .”--Nina Lary, Bitch

“Depression: A Public Feeling… sets out to challenge ‘contemporary medical notions’ of depression ‘that simultaneously relieve one of responsibility (it’s just genes or chemicals) and provide agency (you can fix it by taking a pill)’. . . . In anatomising her ‘lived experience’ of writer’s block, Cvetkovich invites the reader to ask whether, despite the trade-specific terminology, this is still a symptom exclusive to writers. . . . [H]er perceptions are agile.”--Talitha Stevenson, New Statesman

“The book’s merit is in jolting us out of our habit of thinking about depression as a personal, medical issue, reminding us of the ways in which the rules and roles of society influence our psyches and feelings about ourselves. By taking depression out of the exclusive domain of the therapeutic culture, [Cvetkovich] challenges us to make new connections between the individual’s experience of depression and life within a depressive culture.”--Irene Javors, Gay and Lesbian Review/Worldwide

“[Cvetkovich] has taken some huge risks with Depression. Rather than building a traditional academic argument with research and theory, the book combines stylistically distinct and potentially disparate parts that add up to a highly readable, relatable, radical treatise that provides many points of entry and fresh thinking on one of the most overexamined subjects of the past few decades.”--Cindy Widner, Austin Chronicle

“Depression succeeds at opening up a public discussion on certain kinds of depression that are often dismissed as trivial, like the stress of academic labour. . . . [C]lear and helpful with a vision for overcoming melancholy through a transformation of everyday life.”--William Burton, Lambda Literary Review

[Paulina · Rating 5 out of 5]

"My contribution to this discussion is to insist that daily life in all its ordinariness can be a basis for the utopian project of building new worlds in response to both spiritual despair and political depression. As forms of practice, rituals such as crafting, knitting, and other hobbies, as well as yoga, running, and other forms of exercise, belong to what I want to call a utopia of ordinary habit. . . . The utopia of ordinary habit would be aversion of Avery Gordon's "usable utopia", a utopia of the "here and now" that is "oriented toward the future" but "doesn't treat the future as either an off-world escape or a displacing fetish," as do forms of utopia often found in the otherworldly exoticisms of science fiction and colonialist dream. It is also reminiscent of Foucault's interest in traditions of asceticism and "practices of the self" that provide a model for new ways of inhabiting the disciplinary regimes that constitute the modern self. It reconceives the rational sovereign subject as a sensory being who crafts a self through process and through porous boundaries between self and other, and between human and the nonhuman (including animals and things).
In addition to knitting and crafting, the utopia of ordinary habit can include the practice of writing that forms the basis for my depression memoir.
The utopia of ordinary habit is forged out of the loss of connection - to the body, to a meaningful sense of work, to relations with others - that characterizes depression. It suggests that within current forms of domestic life there are simultaneously utopian and ordinary desires and activities that can remake the affective cultures of nuclear family life, consumerism, mass media, and neoliberal culture. But it does not seek to gloss over the dire state of contemporary politics, nor to deny the feelings of sadness, apathy, isolation, or anger that are often manifest in the practice of small daily gestures".

[Magdalena O! · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cvetkovich experiments with writing form and includes a memoir in the first section of the book in which she details the last years of her PhD and the first years of her working. She de-pathologizes depression (which she also names bad feelings for its banal connotations), and instead, demonstrates the ways in which it can open up new forms of sociality and serve as foundations for new forms of attachment. She later makes these claims theoretically (is this a kind of grounded theory? j/k!) For her experience, observation, and theory are wound up in each other -- and although she doesn't mention Merleau-Ponty, her queer theory is more phenomenology than psychoanalysis, unlike her interlocutors (Berlant, Panofsky Sedgwick).

She, astutely, argues against big pharma drugs to claim that anxiety and bad feelings are enmeshed in the conditions that patriarchal, white supremacist capitalism gives rise to. She uses the memoir as a way to extrapolate meaning from experience, but to also not obfuscate experience with 'simply' and immediately asking what it means. It's crucial we learn how to describe our embodied lived experience and the environment in detail. Then we can do the interpretative theoretical work. But many of us skip that step.

Her way of integrating feminist art (Allyson Mitchell! Le Tigre!) is also sharp and useful for those writing with and about feminist art.

tl;dr: If Ann Cvetkovich can have paralyzing anxieties and troubles with work, finishing, etc. then we're all doing ok! Keep on livin!

[Melodie Roschman · Rating 4 out of 5]

I want to give this five stars, but the one nagging issue with this book for me is Cvetkovich's treatment of medication and taking it for depression. I really appreciate this book's insistence that a lot of depression is societally motivated and then coping with mental health struggles, sadness, and despair requires a holistic approach that can include good habits, meditation, the body, and sociality, but I think that it is often dismissive and condescending towards people that use medication, and it glosses over the biological factors (i.e. the lack of serotonin) that often make depression so debilitating and impossible to "treat."
That being said, there's a lot here that I love - specifically the combination of memoir and critical essay, and the (vital to my dissertation) connection she makes between spirituality, craft, and memoir. It was worth a read for the section on crafting alone - I love the connection she makes between knitting/sewing/crafting in general, spiritual practice meditation, and paying attention during the mundane realities of everyday life - i.e. flossing, grocery shopping, exercise, etc.
Over all, a fantastically soft and honest and creative and relatable theory book that could have extended some of that gentleness and understanding to people who can do all the yoga in the world and still need pills (4.5 stars).

[Remy · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5
Hmm. I will need some time to really process this book, I think. It was definitely an interesting and worthwhile read but I can't help but feel it didn't explore the topic deeply enough. There was a lot of meandering, analysis of works of other writers, as well as artists, etc--which is fine and all, but in some ways sort of diluted the central thesis.
Cvvetkovich critiques the medical model of depression by situating it in context: science is a social/cultural phenomenon, so the idea of medicine as being pure and empirical is an illusion. Thus considering other areas of study to analyze depression (such as history), how mental illness in general is a social concept, is a key part of understanding why people feel the way they do.
Overall, worthwhile read, but left me wanting more.

[Kat]

I received this book as part of a Goodreads giveaway. Review will follow.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

With the exception perhaps of some of The Depression Journals and some of the chapter on acedia, I adore this book. It nails precisely how my misgivings with David Burns evolved since my quasi-popular review of Feeling Good was posted. It elucidates ways in which I square my sympathies with Buddhism, mindfulness, and varying degrees of spirituality with a firmly-held allegiance to godlessness. It better addresses how and why I feel my depression to be 'queerer', in a sense, than the ones ascribed to me in therapy or by the medical models listed here. It confirms what Marilynne Robinson says in the brilliant The Death of Adam about what we close off to ourselves when we don't look deeper into the past for ancient answers that should not be ignored simply because they are ancient. We have certainly done a disservice to ourselves intellectually by assuming progression through time automatically means progression in 'right thought.' It has relieved me from feeling a sense of FOMO about donating my copy of The Anatomy of Melancholy. Cvetkovich's book will be a bit of a falter in the beginning, but please trust that it is structured - and feels like - an immensely satisfying crescendo. Everything builds delightfully and it rewards the reader's patience with an abundance of dividends. Highly recommended as a deep dive into a queerer sort of depression that gives name and familiarity to something that felt foreign within me. A great work of intellectual rigor and uplift.

[Zach · Rating 2 out of 5]

Though it may just be symptomatic of me taking a break between the autobio and the theory sections, I didn't see them interwoven in a theoretically necessary manner. The project gestures at a nonmedical understanding of depression, but never really examines what depression is as an affect in an ontologically rigorous way. Neither is there a broader framework for thinking through how status and identity inflects and transforms depression. The book examines a sort of middle class professional depression and makes apologies for that focus, but doesn't truly provincialize itself. It ends by proposing of a utopia of everyday habit, an attempt at concept construction which seems completely oblivious to the class history around hobbies or the constraints of family (again, aside from an obligatory nod). But the project's greatest weakness in my eyes is the undialectical relation between the medical/chemical and the spiritual. The spiritual is simply something else you can choose at will, instead of something which is constructed by its opposition to the medical/chemical. Cvetkovich never circles back to illuminate and re-relate us to the medical/chemical. The binary is preserved in the argument, which is much weaker for it.

[Mariam Rawwas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cvetkovich is the best affect theory has to offer, if first and foremost due to her methodology's curious intersection with archival studies... Here, we are offered yet another, this time via memoir—a distinctly "feminine" approach to the topic, as frustrating as that might be to note—which helps fill out the discussion with a more "phenomenological" account, if we'll be allowed. Cvetkovich begins the formal discussion through the category of "acedia," attempting to excavate the theological underpinnings of mental health discourse rather than take the too-easy anti-psychiatry or social causation approach. I also greatly appreciate the engagements with the works of Saidiya Hartman and Jacqui Alexander, the former via Lose Your Mother. Overall, it's a strong work, one that also finishes with engagements in art theory, including discussions of the works of Allyson Mitchell, Sheila Pepe, etc. Via the "sentimental bargain" (and the "juxtapolitical"), she also helps to elucidate what makes Berlant's early work compelling (as expositing a mode of compromise specific to women's lives), even if by the time we get to Cruel Optimism, the concept has generalized itself into oblivion.

[Tara Brabazon · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am torn by this review and rating. There are parts of this book that offer some of the best theorization I have ever read.

Then.

Then...

There is large section composed of a depression 'memoir'. And a large section on craft...

The research on depression as a cultural and social phenomenon is outstanding. Offering a political analysis of depression, the book probes the consequences of pathologizing depression in and through neoliberalism.

There is also powerful explorations of why "the middle-class white woman has been central to medical histories of mental illness."

Most importantly, there is a presentation of the consequences when a social problems become "problems of feeling."

There are transformative sentences in this book. Then there is the stuff on a personal memoir and craft... But there are sentences present that offer a gateway to a different way of thinking...

[Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was such an intriguing and awesome read. Whilst I spent most of my time highlighting ideas, I still found Cvetkovich’s writing to be smoothly fluid. This book has definitely helped me concrete some ideas (such as the war on worries and political depression) that was opened doors for my thinking of depression in a totally different way. The idea of ethnography through memoir, as well as other forms of creative expression, is another theme I will be able to incorporate into my future work.

[ND · Rating 4 out of 5]

rich, provocative, and complex. Even Cvetkovich is uncertain about publishing her depression journals, but doing so within a larger book of theory and analysis is kind of fun and daring, at least for an academic.

[daniel dillon · Rating 5 out of 5]

The memoir of Part 1 was deeply affecting, as I find myself poised at the very career juncture that starts the whole thing. But the essay(s) of Part 2 were no less potently insightful, and have given me some clarity on parts of my own research.

[Alexa Doran · Rating 5 out of 5]

Damn. This book is so relevant. Against the backdrop of multiple genocides, Trump, the ever dwindling lack of political representation any citizen feels..Cvetkovich gets it. Repetitive in the way all theory is repetitive but otherwise needed, a gem.

[Em · Rating 2 out of 5]

some great quotes, anecdotes, and ideas, disappointing delivery from a woman whose white, middle-class identity dominates the way she thinks, writes, and makes judgements.

[Raoul W · Rating 3 out of 5]

very refreshing to think about depression not as an individual problem or failure, but as a shared, public and relational phenomenon.