ABSTRACT
One of the great joys of sociology is the freedom it provides to periodically reinvent oneself. Over the course of nearly 40 years I have explored a variety of topics. My doctoral dissertation involved participant observation in New York’s Times Square (Karp 1973). As a newly minted assistant professor I co-authored books on urban social psychology (Karp et al. 1991) and the “sociology of everyday life” (Karp et al. 2004). Then, as I approached midlife my attention turned to questions of aging. That personal interest led to another book (Clair et al. 1993) and, in turn, to a several-year interview study of people between 50 and 60 years old (see, for example, Karp 1989). Along the way I have been intrigued by such matters as student participation in college classrooms (Karp and Yoels 1976) and what happens in upper middle-class families during the year that a child applies to college (see, for example, Karp et al. 1998). Since the early 1990s my abiding interest has been to decipher the experiences of mental illness (Karp 1996; 2000; 2006). Such a peripatetic research history might lead to the conclusion that there
is little consistency to my sociological thinking. However, I maintain that all of my writing has been driven by a few global theoretical questions. Shortly after entering graduate school I was introduced to the works of those who were shaping a distinctive sociological social psychology which came to be labeled “symbolic interaction theory” (Blumer 1969). Nearly instantly I felt an affinity with this emerging perspective and its principal idea that there are no intrinsic meanings to objects, events, and situations. Rather, human beings collectively invest their daily worlds with meaning. Such a view leads social psychologists of my stripe to ask, “How do people make sense of complicated life circumstances and how are their behaviors, emotions, and attitudes linked to such interpretive processes?” This is the fundamental question that motivates and animates all my writing. Diagnosed with depression in my early 30s, I have been grappling for
more than 30 years with the meanings and consequences of emotional illness. Since I am an ardent believer in C. Wright Mills’ (1959) injunction that
social scientists should “translate private troubles into public issues,” I began to explore the possibility of writing a book on depression in the late 1980s. As any researcher would, I initially plugged the words “clinical depression” into several databases. I learned that social scientists had by that time written hundreds of articles on depression. However, nearly all of them were survey research efforts linking the incidence of depression to an enormous array of variables. It struck me as an exceedingly odd omission that researchers were writing about a feeling disorder and yet rarely did I hear the feelings of those with the disorder. In this respect, the starting point for Speaking of Sadness was an urge to fulfill one of sociology’s most enduring mandates-to give voice to those whose experiences are typically marginalized or discounted altogether. I also had the hope that by listening to others’ narratives I might gain greater insight into my own life difficulties. These days, a growing number of sociologists practice “auto-ethnography”
(see, for example, Ellis and Bochner 2002). Effectively, these colleagues are writing sociologically informed biographical narratives. They are using their own experiences to reflect on generic social processes. In retrospect I find it interesting that one of the pre-publication reviewers of Speaking of Sadness commented that “Perhaps a book such as this could not have been written a decade ago, but today, with the introduction of the ‘postmodern impulse’ in ethnography, we are permitted greater liberty in using ourselves, subjectively, as characters in our own science.” It may indeed be that postmodern intellectual currents influenced the decision to tell parts of my own story at the beginning of Speaking of Sadness. However, I simply thought that sharing my struggles with depression was the most honest thing to do. After all, “when we discuss others, we are always talking about ourselves” (Krieger 1991: 4). It was only fair that readers understand how my own experiences shaped my biases, intersected with my theoretical sensibilities, and potentially influenced my interpretations of the 50 in-depth interviews at the heart of the book. In the end, though, good social science requires that the interpretations and analyses offered be strictly disciplined by the data collected. Researchers ought to creatively use their own experiences as long as they “let the world speak back” (Blumer 1969). My awkward dance with depression over many years also powerfully
articulated with my interests as a social psychologist. As I grew more serious about the project and began to think about how I might approach things conceptually, one phrase in particular-“negotiating ambiguity”—became a constant part of my internal dialogues. Ongoing reflection on my own illness path reminded me how confusing and opaque my depression journey had been to that point. It took years before I could/would attach the word depression to my feelings. People do not typically wake up one morning and tell themselves, “I’m a person suffering from a disease called depression. Therefore, I better get myself to a psycho-pharmacologist who will give me an antidepressant to correct a serotonin imbalance in my brain.”
