Living with Depression: Illness and Identity Turning Points

This article reports on an in-depth interview investigation of 2O persons who have been diagnosed and treated for unipolar depression. The article proceeds from the observation that although a great deal of survey research has been directed at trying to understand the causes for depression, very little writing has explored the subjective experience of depression. The depression experience is conceived as a moving perspective or career through which persons try to make sense of their inherently ambiguous life condition. Analysis focuses on the major benchmarks in this career process. The key points in the career process are (a) having inchoate feelings of distress, (b) coming to feel that something is "really wrong," (c) having a crisis, (d) coming to grips with an illness identity, and sometimes (e) defining depression as a condition one can get past. Each of these stages corresponds to transformations in persons' self-conceptions.