ABSTRACT
In the preceding chapters, I explored women's accounts of depression, recovery from depression, and self-care. Adopting a feminist critical-realist perspective, I endeavoured to produce an analysis that attends to both the material and embodied aspects of women's experiences (including rape, abuse, poverty, domestic and care-giving labour, as well as the toll of these on women's bodies), and to the ways in which these, and indeed all experience are socially constructed through discourse. By grounding the analysis in women's stories, I hoped to generate a compassionate understanding of women's despair, healing, and well-being that would resonate with the women I spoke with, while also developing a critical analysis of the ways in which their accounts are shaped by discourse.
