The Path Back to Normal Life: The Life-World and the Production of the Subject of People Living with Depression

Abstract

This article attempts to study the life worlds of people with depression struggling to return to ‘normal’ lives, told through the experiences of 6 interlocutors. Michel Foucault’s notion of ‘technologies of power’ and ‘technologies of the self’ will serve as frameworks to understand the rationality of the psychiatric power operations and the struggling strategy of people living with depression and surviving in the power in which the patients’ body becomes the perimeter for power operation and identity construction. On one side, the psychiatric power operation attempts to create ‘positive-docile subject’ in hope to diagnose, resolve, and recuperate the identity of those with depression to restore productivity and possess the attitude that conforms to the dominant social norms and standards once more. However, on the other hand, people with depression are not merely the products nor victims of the psychiatric power operations and structural power; they have acquired and utillized various discourses such as depressive identity, motherhood, and the vernicular belief of merits and sins to foster and construct their own identities. They do this as the method of those in a structural disadvantage to negotiate, challenge, and even alter the relationship of power in hope of returning to ‘normal’ mental health and lives once more.