Abstract
While the analysis of depression narratives has become increasingly common practice within critical mental health research, this work rarely investigates how these accounts intersect with particular social identities. The recent emergence of the ‘top girl’ identity, a new cultural slot on offer for young women, is underpinned by the rise of neoliberal and post-feminist discourses in the Western world. To explore whether this new feminine subjectivity is indeed taken up by young women and how it shapes their experience of depression, we conducted in-depth interviews with 13 young professional women in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Based on a dialogical approach to theorising and researching subjectivity, we identified repetitive inter-relations between different voices-of-the-self and the voices of depression. The most pervasive pattern in the sample consists of what we have termed demanding voices associated with the ‘top girl’ position, which construct depression as an individual deficit thereby discouraging young women from exploring the sociocultural origins of their distress. In contrast, resistant voices emphasise relationality and a (re)connection with meaningful values and, therefore, seem to be productive for individual recovery.
Introduction
[T]he self is performed as a kind of contrapuntal dialogue of voices between which the locus of subjectivity (and hence the nature of identity) continually shifts. (Gregg, 1991: xiv)
The voices that compose the experience of depression can be loud and demanding or hesitant and halting. In this article, we investigate the voices through which a group of young professional women narrate their experience of depression. Our analytic focus lies on the discursive underpinnings of what has been called the ‘top girl’ identity (McRobbie, 2007), an emergent cultural slot for young high-achieving women, as well as more marginalised counter-voices. We conclude by discussing the potentially harmful consequences of the dominance of the ‘top girl’ perspective, both for thinking about recovery from depression and the possibility for social change.
Increasingly within popular discourse, young (middle-class) women have been positioned as in the vanguard of social change (Harris, 2004). As part of a broader cultural shift towards a ‘feminisation of success’ (Adkins, 2001), notably in education (Renold and Allan, 2006) with the media lamenting a crisis of systematically ‘underachieving’ boys (Titus, 2004), girls and young women are being offered a new, beguiling, post-feminist identity as a ‘top girl’. They are told that if they agree to become productive, enterprising citizens who stay positive, even in the face of adversity (Gill and Orgad, 2015, 2018), that is, to enact ideal neoliberal subjectivities, there will be no impediments to success and happiness. According to McRobbie (2007), this process aims at ‘re-shap[ing] notions of womanhood to fit with new or emerging (neo-liberalised) social and economic arrangements’ and centres on attributing women with ‘capacity, success, attainment, enjoyment, entitlement, social mobility and participation’ (p. 721). Certainly, new, more active notions of femininity and female striving have advantages over older ideologies of feminine passivity and fear of success. Critical feminist scholars have challenged this ‘progress narrative’ (Everingham et al., 2007), however, arguing that such post-feminist rhetoric conceals the ‘new gender regime’, which impels ‘the new female subject … to be silent, to withhold critique in order to count as a modern sophisticated girl’ (McRobbie, 2009: 12). They suggest that, in effect, this neoliberal, post-feminist regime does little to rework structural inequalities based on gender by rendering invisible any explanation for failure except personal incapacity and poor choices. As a consequence of unachievable expectations, girls and young women are encouraged to habitually engage in perfectionist self-monitoring activities for fear of not being ‘good enough’ and often report high levels of emotional distress (Walkerdine et al., 2001). Numerous, mostly quantitative, studies have explored the links between perfectionism and emotional distress or depression (i.e. Flett et al., 2007; McRobbie, 2015; O’Connor et al., 2010) and there exists a wide range of research on women and depression (i.e. Fullagar and O’Brien, 2014; Lafrance, 2007; Stoppard, 1998; Ussher, 2010). However, to our knowledge a nuanced and in-depth investigation of how young, high-performing women negotiate depression and whether they engage in discursive practices associated with the ‘top girl’ identity has not been undertaken up until now.
Analysing ‘illness’ narratives has become increasingly common practice within critical research on mental health (i.e. Cohen, 2008; Fullagar and O’Brien, 2013; Galasinski, 2008). This focus on the accounts of those affected by psychological distress is rooted in political concerns, such as giving a voice to the marginalised, but also in the growing recognition that the in-depth investigation of the narration of experience is essential to understanding complex phenomena like depression. How people position themselves within available discourses reveals something about desired and desirable identities as well as troubled and problematic identities and captures some of the meaning-making processes involved, both of which have implications for recovery. Self-narratives imbue ongoing life with past constructions, carrying them forward, by ‘presencing’ the ‘history of the agent’. The repeated and (often) habitual performance of these narratives means that they build and, to a certain extent, can reify identities.
Descriptions of the lived experience of depression, particularly those of a phenomenological orientation, have yielded rich and layered accounts of what psychological suffering feels like (Ratcliffe, 2014; Woodgate, 2006), or rather of the narrative forms and practices through which it can be ‘spoken’. Our primary interest pertains to how the speaking subject ‘orchestrates’ (Gregg, 1991) the different voices-of-the-self as they enter into dialogue in accounts of depression. We situate our work within a social constructionist epistemology and explore what particular discursive ‘framings’ of depression ‘do’, both on an individual and a sociopolitical level.
Negotiating identity and depression
There exists a growing body of research on how women’s depression narratives draw upon and are constituted by gender norms, neoliberal discourse and the rise of biopolitics (Belle and Doucet, 2003; Blum and Stracuzzi, 2004; Brown et al., 2000; Fullagar and O’Brien, 2014; Nikelly, 1995; Scattolon and Stoppard, 1999; Stoppard, 1998). Fullagar’s (2009) work on the ‘neurochemical self’, for instance, powerfully demonstrates the social contexts operating when women draw on a biological understanding of depression and selfhood, namely the ‘pressure to perform an idealized feminine, superwoman or self-sacrificing identity’, where antidepressant use ensures the continued functionality expected of women in contemporary society (p. 402). Lafrance (2007) is similarly interested in the effects of medicalising depression, but mainly focuses on women’s use of the biomedical discourse as a strategy of legitimisation and destigmatisation. Other studies have explored the ‘disciplinary’ effect of popular and expert discourse on women and depression through linking depression to ‘natural’ characteristics of the female body and mind thereby constructing women as inherently vulnerable or inferior (Hurt, 2007; Ussher, 2010). MacKay and Rutherford’s (2012) investigation of feminist women’s accounts of depression is one of the few studies that explores the impact of a particular political identification on the gendered experience and narration of depression. Even though participants’ identification with a feminist worldview made it more likely for them to draw on social or contextual models of depression, the women, nevertheless, also positioned themselves within the biomedical discourse. Overall, this body of work sheds light on what depression ‘feels like’ and reveals the sociocultural frameworks available to women for making sense of their distress, but more work is needed on the relation between gendered identity intersections and women’s accounts of depression. Focusing on ‘top girls’ (defined by age, achievement and social class) should allow more insight into the lived texture of professionalism, gender and depression.
The dialogical self and depression
The term ‘dialogical self’ was coined by Hermans et al. (1992) and is based on the notion of dialogism developed by the Russian philosopher and literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin. In the past two decades, Bakhtin’s ideas, particularly his writings on the polyphonic novel and the dialogical nature of language (use), have been picked up and reworked by various social scientists as a tool for theorising and researching subjectivity (i.e. Buitelaar, 2006; Burkitt, 2010; Leiman, 2011; Richardson et al., 1998). At the heart of the dialogical approach lies the assumption that the self is made up of multiple ‘voices’ or ‘I-positions’ representing different perspectives. These arise as a result of the ‘interiorization’ (Richardson et al., 1998: 509) of speech events – that is, dialogues with others. Akin to the notion of subject positions developed by Davies and Harré (1990), the focus lies on dynamic, context-dependent multiplicity, which stands in sharp contrast to the modernist self, which is assumed to be coherent and singular. Hermans et al. (1992) stress the importance of embodiment with the self being ‘always tied to a particular position in space and time (either physically or mentally)’ and to sociality (p. 29). It is these central features of selfhood that lead to the self being ‘permeated with otherness’ (Richardson et al., 1998: 510). Hermans et al. (1992: 28–29) further claim that [t]he I has the possibility to move, as in a space, from one position to the other in accordance with changes in situation and time. The I fluctuates among different and even opposed positions. The I has the capacity to imaginatively endow each position with a voice so that dialogical relations between positions can be established. The voices function like interacting characters in a story.
Smith and Sparkes (2008) contend that in dialogical accounts of subjectivity ‘relatedness and collective voices in the main precede individuality and personal voices’ and in this way the self can be understood as a sociocultural construction (p. 20). However, Blackman (2005) points out that there is a risk here of a new form of essentialism and universalism when ‘multivoicedness is viewed as desirable, adaptive and normative’, arguing that dialogicality ‘naturalises flexibility’ (p. 189). This essentialising becomes apparent in the study of the ‘pathological’ self where inherent differences between healthy and ‘ill’ versions of dialogicality are presupposed and dysfunctionality is linked to the inability of ‘the I … to move flexibly from one part of the self to another’ (Hermans, 2008: 189).
What, then, does the study of depression through the lens of the dialogical self have to offer? And how can we avoid the trap of universalism? Expanding on George H. Mead’s notion of the ‘generalised other’ and Bakhtin’s ‘social languages’, Hermans (2001) proposes the exploration of collective voices. This idea was taken up by Buitelaar (2006) in her research on the narration of intersectionality by a well-known daughter of Moroccan migrant workers in the Netherlands. Her juxtaposition of the voice of Islam with the female voice and the voice of the politician in her interviewee’s account reveals central identity conflicts and dynamics of the intersectional or multivoiced self. As Hermans (2001) points out, ‘the voices of some groups have more opportunity to be heard than others’ (p. 57). This link between external social relations, in particular the dominance of neoliberal and post-feminist modes of sense-making, and intra-psychic voices is what makes the analysis of the dialogical self a potentially powerful tool for understanding the sociocultural context of depression in young professional women.
Method
As part of a larger critical qualitative study on the sociocultural context of emotional distress and depression in young professional women in Aotearoa/New Zealand (Chowdhury, 2018a, 2018b; Chowdhury and Gibson, in press), 13 women were interviewed about their experience of depression. We were interested in talking to women who could be placed in the social category of high achiever, in those exemplifying McRobbie’s (2007) description of ‘top girls’. Recruiting, therefore, focused on young professional women working in contexts and roles characteristic of high achievers (e.g. law, management and accounting). After ethics approval had been obtained, a call for volunteers was circulated to the female employees in a large professional services firm in Auckland. In addition, the social media platform Reddit was used to ask for volunteers to participate in ‘a study on young professional women and depression’. Despite the wide dissemination of information about the project, the recruitment process was slow and difficult. We interpreted this as possibly due to the conflictual identity work involved in, and the stigma attached to, being a depressed, high-performing young woman. Furthermore, the enormous time pressures experienced by many young professional women negotiating the demands of their careers mean that there is little time left for ‘extracurricular’ activities such as volunteering for research. The age range of the participants was 24–39 years; the median age of the sample was 27 years. Eleven of the women were married or partnered, four women had children and five women described their sexuality in other than heterosexual terms. All participants had received tertiary education; nine worked in the private sector (i.e. as solicitor, HR manager and management consultant), four in the public sector (mostly in advisory roles). The sample predominantly identified as New Zealand European or Caucasian/white (one woman identified as part Maori, one woman as Indian) and most women were born in New Zealand. Even though a medical diagnosis of depression was not required of participants, all interviewees reported having been diagnosed and prescribed antidepressant medication. Eight women were still using antidepressant medication at the time of the interview, but only two of the women who had stopped using medication described themselves as not currently depressed. The majority of participants talked about experiencing or having experienced other forms of emotional distress in addition to depression, mostly anxiety. All participants made references to a high-achiever identity at some point during the interview, for example describing themselves as ‘competitive’, ‘one of the top pupils’ or wanting to be ‘exceptional in all the areas’.
The interviews were conducted by the first author – a female social scientist similar in age to the participants and likely to be seen as familiar with the pressures experienced by ‘top girls’. They took place in Auckland and Wellington (two major cities in New Zealand) at a location of mutual convenience such as the university or the participant’s home or workplace. They lasted on average for about an hour and were audio-taped (with permission). The interviewing format chosen was the narrative interview (Kohler Riessman, 1993, 2008); overall participants were encouraged to tell their story in their own words, that is, to decide which experiences and life events to elaborate on and how many and which details to include in the narrative. Interviews always began by asking about an image the participant associated with her depression to encourage her to talk about aspects of her lived experience beyond the dominant medical framings. This often segued into the telling of a particular memory or aspect of the depression experience, for example, one interviewee brought in a picture of a girl alone on a swing, which prompted her to talk about the need to hide her depression at work, and the conversation flowed organically from there. If this did not happen, the interviewer usually asked the interviewee to talk about ‘how it all began’ or ‘the circumstances around when she first felt depressed’. Further questions posed in all interviews (usually towards the end) explored participants’ personal understanding of depression, whether they felt that gender played a role (only if they had not brought up this topic themselves) and about what positively and negatively affected their mood. The question related to gender was meant to gauge participants’ familiarity and identification with feminist readings of depression.
The interviews were fully transcribed. Pseudonyms consistent with participants’ ethnicity were assigned to the interview transcripts. After having listened to and read the interviews several times to gain a sense of the stories as a whole, the first author then analysed participants’ accounts with a particular focus on the dialogical relations between different I-positions. This process consisted of marking out and collating all the data excerpts, which contained positively and negatively connoted self-positionings, that is, talk about work and ‘how to be professional’ or more general self-characterisations (‘I am a very curious person’), to get a sense of the range of voices present in the data set. The first author then located all the data excerpts where participants were taking on various perspectives in relation to their depression and where these different voices seemed to dialogue, asking ‘what is happening to the voices of depression here?’, which led to the identification of the two main patterns – ‘demanding’ and ‘resistant’ voices.
Our analysis is premised on a psychosocial approach to theorising and researching subjectivity derived from critical discursive psychology (Wetherell, 2003, 2008), where the subject is assumed to be socially constituted, positioned within multiple (and unequal) relations. Because these relations and the situatedness are fluid, the subject is fragmented and unfinalised in its identifications and sense of self, shaped by ongoing activities and interactions. (Taylor, 2017: 227)
Accordingly, we do not view the described voices or their relationships as fixed internal structures of the individual but as social positions or cultural slots taken up by the narrator in a particular context and for particular ends. However, the subject positions and ‘local resources’ (Taylor, 2010) that a person has employed in the past to tell – and construct – herself constrain the ways in which her experience of depression can be told in the present, both to herself and to others. The dialogical relations between different voices-of-the-self, which we identified in participants’ accounts, therefore, likely form part of habitual identity practices where particular social positions are being customised and reworked as internal.
Analysis
In what follows, we first introduce the voices of depression before moving on to describe what we have termed demanding voices associated with the ‘top girl’ position and, finally, what we label as resistant voices. Our aim is not to explore the particular patterning of voices and positions for each participant in depth but rather to identify the most pervasive I-positions across the sample and discuss the implications of repetitive inter-relations between voices.
‘Everything becomes harder’ – depressed voices
In the first extract, Taylor (26, research analyst) draws on the language of physics to convey what depression feels like for her ([…] means omission): I don’t know if it is exactly an image but it sort of feels like when you are walking through water at the beach and it is like waist height so everything is harder, like the extra […] It’s just like everything seems to take more energy, even just walking. It almost feels like the world has got more resistant and gravity is stronger. You sort of want to go lie down and not move. That just everything feels so hard to do, even really simple things like getting up off the couch, it feels like gravity is just holding you there.
At the core of her account is a metaphor of gravity, external force and stasis, which articulates the voice of depression for Taylor. The ‘I’ is held down, slowed almost to the point of complete immobility – ‘you sort of want to go lie down and not move’. Similar imagery was also used by other participants, that is ‘it’s Golden Syrup or molasses’ (Paiseley, 29, consultant) or being ‘trapped under a wave [with no] power or energy to fight it’ (Lisa, 26, management trainee). As McKenzie-Mohr and Lafrance (2011) point out, using a gravity metaphor allows the speaker to take on an ‘agent-patient subject position’ constructing herself simultaneously as at the mercy of an external force (depression) and endowed with the capacity to ‘pull herself out’ (of depression) (p. 59).
Another prevalent voice formulated depression as a kind of abnormal emotionality. In the following extract, Sandy (36, HR Manager) describes her experience of depression as ‘a game of two halves’: And sometimes when day to day little things come up, when you are depressed, I don’t know, almost it gets a bit water off a duck’s back, I just don’t care about anything (laughs), you know, if that makes sense. But then sometimes little things can also on the contrary be a trigger to push you to extreme emotion. So it’s kind of a game of two halves I find.
The depressed ‘I’ evoked here oscillates back and forth between being overly emotional and completely indifferent. Contrary to the above-described images of slowness and apathy, this formulation is focused on a tendency towards extremes. For Jenny (29, solicitor), this consisted of her ‘burst[ing] into tears all the time’ although she is ‘not a crier’, whereas Catherine (26, policy advisor) described her depressed self as ‘the crazy brain’, which thinks, feels and acts in opposition to ‘the logical brain’.
The depressed ‘I’ most clearly articulated her pain in talk of suicidality: I took two trains in the morning and two trains on the way back and every morning it would be more and more like ‘you can jump in front of the train and you wouldn’t be so miserable’ […] so after about four weeks I contacted a psychiatrist because I was really scared that I was actually going to do something quite drastic and got some, I got prescribed Mirtazapine and yeah that kind of stopped the suicidal urges […]. (Lisa, 26, management trainee)
In contrast to the previous accounts, which articulated depression as a mute, predominantly bodily self, in this extract the depressed voice not only verbally expresses its despair but also asks Lisa to take, albeit destructive, action, to which she responds by seeking help from a psychiatrist. We found several instances of this narrative across the data set, in which suicidal thoughts mark a kind of tipping point ‘triggering’ medical treatment.
In these accounts, depression becomes formulated variously as a slowness, a kind of abnormal emotionality, and as a great despair and longing for death, which stands in sharp contrast to the image of the empowered, upbeat and always in control ‘top girl’. In the following two sections, we explore other voices-of-the-self and how they relate to this depressed self.
‘Get on with it’ – demanding voices
The most prevalent relational pattern in regard to the different I-positions we observed in the narratives consisted of a privileging of the voices we read as associated with the ‘top girl’ identity. Typically, at some point in the majority of the interviews, these subdued and admonished the voices articulating suffering and distress despite the fact that several interviewees speculated on a link between depression and ‘having high standards’ or ‘being perfectionist’. In the following extract, for example, Jenny (29, solicitor) describes what living with depression feels like for her: I think depression dealing with depression for me is a lot, particularly at work, is a lot about trying to convince myself and others that I’m fine because you need to be operating at the required level. You’ve got clients that pay you megabucks to do, you know, for the work you do, so you have to be on your game all the time and whether you feel like crawling into a hole and dying or not (laughs), you just have to get on with it. And at times when I am not feeling that great it is a real battle and you get to the end of the week and you just feel shattered from spending so much mental energy trying to be okay for everyone else’s benefit.
Jenny’s account sets up a conflict between voices associated with the ‘top girl’ position and depressed I-positions. The ‘top girl’ voice, which is clearly linked to her professional identity as a solicitor here, formulates a string of demands – ‘you need to be operating at the required level’, ‘you’ve got clients that pay you megabucks’, ‘you have to be on your game all the time’. The shift to the second person perspective creates a recognisable form of dialogue within her talk, where the professional voice speaks to the voices of depression. Using ‘you’ instead of ‘I’ not only makes this voice sound somewhat admonishing – as in ‘this is what you should be/act like’ – but also suggests a certain (emotional) distance from it. The fact that Jenny frames the relationship between her depressed self and Jenny-as-professional as ‘a real war’ emphasises how much they are at odds and turns her depression into a kind of oppositional force, something she needs to fight against and overcome. As a consequence, the depressed self that feels like ‘crawling into a hole and dying’ and is ‘shattered from spending so much mental energy’ is subdued in order to ‘convince myself and others that I’m fine’.
Like Jenny, Shelly, a 36-year-old management consultant, talks about the relationship between depression and her work performance: It’s a pretty hard environment and you don’t want to show any sign of weakness. […] And I know that they would be good about it but I didn’t want to be the person with depression or treated any differently or anything. It’s already really difficult from a male-female thing. […] Probably at an analyst level we’ve got more females than males but definitely to go up is harder as a female or seems to be. […] But I guess now that I have established a bit of a reputation, and they know who I am and what I do, then actually I would quite happily put that into the mix because I am sure I am not the only one […] so actually I wouldn’t have a problem with it being out on the table. I am capable and I am dealing with things and I am producing good results. I’ve just been promoted. So you can’t tell me that depression is holding me back.
In this account, the ‘top girl’ voice is strongly mobilised to counter and manage the I-positions of depression. In Shelly’s response to the interviewer’s question why she has not been open about her depression at work, we first hear a work-based ‘top girl’ voice, which attributes her reticence to working in ‘a hard environment’ where ‘you don’t want to show any sign of weakness’. This explanation, namely not wanting to be treated differently whether as a woman or a depressed person, is then challenged by another voice stating that she would actually ‘quite happily put that into the mix’, that is, tell her work colleagues about her depression. That this is the ‘top girl’ voice speaking becomes clear when we look at the necessary preconditions for this step Shelly is formulating here, namely being someone who ‘has established a reputation’, is ‘capable’, ‘dealing with things’ and ‘producing good results’. Her almost defiant and at the same time triumphal statement ‘you can’t tell me that depression is holding me back’ seems to be addressed not only to the interviewer but to other ghost audiences such as her co-workers, indicating that her depression presents an ongoing threat to her professional identity that needs to be managed by the ‘top girl’.
We gain further insight into the interplay between voices of depression and the ‘top girl’ position when the interviewer goes on to ask, ‘what if depression was holding you back?’ to which Shelly replies, That’s the thing because my doctor, every time I talk to him, he’s like ‘so I’ve got patients who, they were working in a shop and they were doing it really well and so they got promoted to the shop manager, but when they were manager the depression just got really bad and so they spiralled out and they had to leave. And then they got better and well enough so they got a job in another shop and then they would do so well and get promoted to manager and then they would spiral out, until they worked out that actually they can’t be manager. They just have to work in a shop and be good at it’. And when I was thinking about that I was like ‘nah, nah, I am far too competitive and I know what I want and ambitious to let this hold me back’. So that’s not an option. And I know I’m really hard on myself, but yeah it’s not an excuse. So no (laughs), it was never an option. And yeah I guess if I hadn’t been able to deal with it so moving to [subsection of big firm] I worked out that ‘yeah I can still perform and I can still do a hard job’, because they threw some pretty tricky stuff at me there and be successful even though I’ve still got depression, so it worked. If I had got there and I had found that I just fell apart again then that would have been different probably and I probably would have had to seriously rethink what I was doing, but fortunately I haven’t had to because I enjoy what I do and I don’t want to give it up and I am ambitious.
This lengthy narrative about depressed people who are held back in their careers by depression was an identity or life trajectory offered to Shelly by her GP but gets immediately repudiated by a voice associated with the ‘top girl’ position – ‘I am far too competitive … and ambitious to let this hold me back’. The unspoken assumption is that depression can be ‘conquered’ by ambition and willpower. Positioning her distress as an antagonist also functions as a counter to the accusation of malingering, a view with a long history (Szasz, 1962), which is echoed in Shelly’s words ‘it’s not an excuse’. As a consequence, the voices of depression are muted as ‘depression’ becomes an almost abstract object, something she has, a hindrance with the potential to ‘hold her back’. The world Shelly narrates is one where failure is defined as not being able to hold depression at bay and where the most important objective is to be a success in spite of depression.
‘We shouldn’t have to be happy all the time’ – resistant voices
We noted that the dominant pattern in participants’ talk set up a conflict between what we described as top girl voices and depressed voices and then resolved this through the subjugating and dismissing of the voices of depression. In this final analytic section we note a minority pattern articulated much less frequently by participants, which helps us understand further some of the effects of the more pervasive privileging of the ‘top girl’ voices. This pattern is characterised by I-positions that validate and amplify the voices of depression; their ‘attitude’ towards the voices of depression is one of understanding and empathy. In the following extract, Mel (26, government service advisor) talks about the connections between depression and professional identity: That was an issue raised by my boss earlier this year where I was having a particularly bad day and I was really not keeping it together all that well and she commented on that, saying that you know the way I was holding myself that day basically was not very reflective of how we should be in a professional corporate environment. It’s like ‘I know this, but I’ve got a lot of stuff going on’. Sometimes it’s tricky to maintain that, especially as you want to be at work because it’s a good distraction, but also taking time off can potentially reflect negatively because you are taking time off and you don’t want to do that. It’s a bit of a tricky balance sometimes. […] It’s slightly strange having to always maintain that corporate professional image 100% of the time, even more so being female than a guy cause females we have to work so much harder to prove ourselves whereas guys can basically just turn up and not have to worry about it. So you have to be perfect all the time but nobody’s perfect 100% of the time. You wouldn’t be human and it’s a bit of that expectation that you should be so I think is not delusional but you know we shouldn’t have to be happy and excited all the time.
As opposed to the extracts analysed in the previous section, the dominant voice in Mel’s account, while expressing familiar tropes around professionalism (‘you are taking time off and you don’t want to do that’), does not seem to be tied to the ‘top girl’ identity. Instead, this new position acknowledges Mel’s distress (‘I’ve got a lot of stuff going on’) and constructs work not as the main source of self-worth, but as ‘a good distraction’ for the depressed self. Critical of the demand ‘to be perfect all the time’ as this ‘wouldn’t be human’, this voice stitches together the I-positions of work and the I-positions of depression. Its statement, ‘we shouldn’t have to be happy and excited all the time’ not only questions the organisational norm of being positive for the sake of others (which was also formulated by Jenny) but also implies that experiencing emotional distress is normal and should be responded to with empathy, that it has the right to ‘be’. This critical view associated with questioning societal norms is backed up by a feminist voice, which links such experiences to gender inequality (‘we have to work so much harder to prove ourselves’) thereby confirming their reasonableness.
A more personal version of the feminist voice, which draws on punk imagery, can be heard in Taylor’s (26, research analyst) answer to a question about the importance of career success the interviewer posed earlier in the interview: I guess a big part of me would define success as being perfect at everything which is obviously really impossible, but I feel like even if I was successful, like wildly successful in my job, if my hair is not going right or I am not really fit and look really good then I am not successful. Like everything has to be all perfect all at once to be considered success. I guess for a while I did have this sort of … so this was when I was first year of Uni with my ex, almost this rebellious phase where I shaved the sides of my head and wore some really outlandish stuff almost to sort of opt out of trying to fit into that model of success and that was probably when I felt most comfortable with my appearance was just completely opting out of that and wearing the weirdest stuff, like literally. I had a skirt I made out of old net curtains and was wearing men’s ties and obviously Doc Martens and yeah. I find that that actually had a better effect for my self-esteem, just to completely opt out than to trying now to wear stuff that I fit into a sort of corporate dress code but it’s not too corporate-y because we are not a suits kind of environment, we are a business casual, but not too casual and then still not look like everybody else, like just to express your personality somehow, I find that really hard.
In the beginning of the extract we clearly hear the demanding ‘top girl’ voice, which equates success with ‘being perfect at everything’. Next Taylor describes another kind of possible self from what she calls ‘this rebellious phase’ in her student years: this self ‘opts out’ of conforming to feminine beauty ideals by wearing ‘outlandish stuff’. The dilemma between the two I-positions of the rebellious self and the perfectionist self is not resolved, however, and at the end of her response she articulates a self that tries to negotiate both the corporate dress code and the demand to express her distinctive personality: a task she describes as ‘hard’. Given the fact that perfectionism was a commonly evoked self-ideal by the top girl voice across the data set, feminist counter-values such as being ‘body positive’ (Carol, 27, web content advisor) might reinforce and validate I-positions struggling with impossible demands and expectations associated with the ‘top girl’ identity. Importantly, Taylor’s narrative calls attention to the connection between voice and embodiment. It is practices of resistance, in this case clothing the body in a transgressive fashion, which challenge the omnipresence of stifling corporate and gender norms that make the feminist voice – at least potentially – ‘therapeutic’.
The third and last counter-voice we want to look at more closely is what we have termed the ethical voice, which is built around discourses of meaning. The following account is Paiseley’s (29, consultant) reply to the interviewer’s question as to whether her work environment is a source of stress: There can be pretty extreme hours. It’s not actually that so much that gets to me because I think I am okay at a) being realistic, no one is going to die in the work that we do and the urgency is often dialled up unnecessarily and sometimes you just have to do the big hard slog and other times you can push back and manage it. So it is not that that I think gets to me. I think a lot of the work can feel a bit meaningless and that is probably the thing I struggle with most and so I try to find that within the work I do, even if it’s selling more stuff and I don’t believe in selling more stuff. So I try to think, ‘how can I still find a positive balance in this to be doing what I am doing’. But if something gets to me over a long period of time I think it is probably where that gets too far out of equilibrium. I get to work on public sector engagements and I get to work on things that I am really happy to be a part of and then there is the other side in making more money for companies that make a lot of money.
The extract begins with a voice, which could be read as being associated with the ‘top girl’ position, repudiating the assumption that work conditions, such as a high workload, cause her distress – ‘it’s not actually that so much that gets to me’. However, in contrast to the demanding voice we heard in Jenny’s account which stated that ‘you have to be on your game all the time’, Paiseley constructs a pragmatic I-position, a self with a certain emotional distance from such injunctions (‘urgency is often dialled up unnecessarily’) that can resist on those grounds: ‘other times you can push back’. The potential cause she points to instead, namely working in a well-paid and secure, but meaningless job, was identified by several other participants, including Jenny, who stated that ‘lot of the time you are just helping companies where the only thing that really is at issue is the dollars […] you don’t get that sense of helping individuals’. Similar to the feminist position, the ethical voice imbues experiences of depression with meaning and makes them intelligible as a reaction to work situations.
Discussion
Our analysis focused on how different voices-of-the-self ‘interact with’ and position depression/the depressed self, which was formulated by participants as an external force and stasis, a tendency towards emotional extremes and a longing for death. Two recurrent sets of interacting voices were identified in the data set. The dominant relational pattern consisted of what we have termed ‘demanding voices’, which subdue and admonish the voices of distress, and give preference to the ‘top girl’ perspective, while the more marginal set of what we call ‘resistant voices’ recognised depression and the voices of depression as a valid and reasonable reaction to difficult life circumstances. The depression narratives analysed in this article were produced in a very specific context, namely as part of a research interview conducted by a young female social scientist who likely was perceived as a fellow ‘top girl’ by the study participants. In combination with the way the project was framed (the working title in the recruiting materials read The price of success: stress and depression in young professional women in New Zealand), this circumstance might have contributed to eliciting the demanding top girl voices so evident in the data set. Furthermore, asking participants as part of the interview why they think they became depressed implied that their depression, in fact, should make sense. Participants’ accounts, therefore, were, at least in part, a response to an accounting challenge. Nonetheless, we believe that our analysis sheds light on some of the identity positions available to and habitually taken up by young professional women trying to make sense of their depression.
As Shelly’s story about the shop assistant whose ascent to a manager position is stalled by depression demonstrates, the ‘top girl’ position is ‘troubled’ by depression and, therefore, needs ‘repair’ (Edley and Wetherell, 1995). Young high-achieving women ‘should not’ get depressed. In other words, if the voices of depression were acknowledged as reasonable, if they were given a platform, so to speak, they might challenge the very foundations of what it means to be a ‘top girl’. Gill and Orgad’s (2018: 6) notion of ‘the bounce-backable woman’ brilliantly captures the injunction to self-alienate, which could be said to fuel the dialogical relation between the ‘top girl’ position and the voices of depression described earlier: Echoing the neoliberal construction of the survivor, which emphasises the individual’s emergence from suffering rather than the cause of her pain (Orgad, 2009), the emphasis in the bouncing back metaphor is on the return journey: overcoming and springing off from crisis, rather than understanding and challenging its social and structural sources.
Psychological pain is, thus, relegated to the margins and reframed as a lack of resilience, which, as the ‘top girl’ voice urges, must be battled and overcome. Feminist voices, on the other hand, encourage a critical reading of the popular ‘women can have it all’ discourse associated with the top girl position and point to the impossibility of this in patriarchal capitalism (Gill and Orgad, 2015). According to this view, women’s ‘constant awareness that you have to prove yourself’ (Charlotte, 39, barrister) arises from persistent gender inequality and might, ultimately, lead to depression, which is thereby relocated in its social and cultural contexts. By dismantling the ideological basis of the ‘top girl’ ideal, namely seeing it as a reaction to new modes of patriarchal capitalism and not as a sign of their eradication, feminist research makes women’s emotional distress intelligible and validates it. At the same time, feminist perspectives can open up various possibilities for both collective and individual action with the potential to turn the private voice of distress into a public voice of anger, which challenges the progress narrative propounded by the ‘top girl’ voice.
This kind of potentiality is described by Lafrance (2014) in her analysis of depressed women’s voiced resistance to the biomedical model, where counter-stories can lead to ‘anger as catalyst for resistant action’ (p. 150). Resistance here might mean the refusal of viewing antidepressants as the only viable treatment, for instance because, as Paiseley (29, consultant) put it, they take away ‘the ability to see difficult things about our world and engage with that’, and because the promotion of a purely biomedical model often glosses over or minimises the considerable negative effects antidepressant medication has for a large proportion of users (Gibson et al., 2016). Furthermore, while medical treatment can contribute to feelings of personal agency in women’s recovery by providing (short-term) relief, long-term use is often associated with a sense of dependency (Cartwright et al., 2018). Resistance might also mean ‘go[ing] to work expecting that I get the support and resources I need’ (Mel, 26, government service advisor). First and foremost, it means an acknowledgement of women’s emotional pain as something more (complex) than a failing body/brain. Tying in with such an act of recognition is the questioning or even repudiation of the recent rise of positive psychology (Cabanas, 2018) and what Ahmed (2010) has termed the ‘happiness imperative’. This new ‘smile or die’ (Ehrenreich, 2010) mantra suggests that a positive mental attitude is something that can be chosen – an idea that is starkly at odds with the experience of depression. As Lucy (30, creative industries professional) aptly phrased it, ‘I didn’t have a button to turn on happiness’. Drawing on post-feminist discourse (Gill, 2017), the ‘top girl’ narrative glorifies (and crassly overestimates) individual capacity and power and consequently produces innumerable ‘failed’ or ‘failing’ women.
Finally, even though, at first glance, the ethical counter-voice seems to draw on an individualist discourse of self-realisation, it also has the potential to de-individualise participants’ emotional distress by infusing the question of individual happiness with a relational understanding of ‘the good life’. If the top girl identity is all about individual control and achievement, with emotional distress as yet another problem to be solved or managed, these more marginal voices stress the importance of relationality. Neoliberal discourse ‘others’ and excludes those in society who lack resilience and ‘the will to succeed’; similarly, the ‘top girl’ voice ‘others’ young women’s emotional pain by monopolising the conversation. On an intrapsychic level, its view of depression as a weakness prevents young women from developing and exploring practices of recovery that go beyond medication and positive thinking, whereas the feminist and the ethical voice identified in our data set emphasise relationality and a (re)connection with meaningful values and, therefore, seem to be productive for individual recovery. The insights from this analysis could be fruitfully applied in psychotherapy, for instance by encouraging women to explore the connections between unrealistically high standards, gender-related pressures and depression and to reflect on and implement recovery strategies outside of the ‘top girl’ mode. However, while these counter-voices draw attention to systemic and structural causes of women’s emotional distress and encourage a more understanding view of depression, they stop short of proposing alternative collective practices with the power to resist or even dismantle patriarchal capitalism. The development of such practices cannot be the responsibility of depressed ‘top girls’ alone; managers and business leaders must step up to the task by recognising how organisational cultures might contribute to women’s distress (for example, in the form of structural sexism) and by questioning taken-for-granted workplace ‘logics’ such as promoting competition and relentless positivity.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
