Black Dogs and Blue Words

Book excerpt: Analyzes the rhetoric surrounding depression. Maintains that the techniques and language of depression marketing strategies, vague words such as worry, irritability, and loss of interest, target women and young girls and encourage self-diagnosis and self-medication. Further, depression narratives and other texts encode a series of gendered messages about health and illness. As depression and other forms of mental illness move from the medical-professional sphere into that of the consumer-public, the boundary at which distress becomes disease grows ever more encompassing, the need for remediation and treatment increasingly warranted. From publisher description.