Depression: A Public Feeling By Ann Cvetkovich

Ann Cvetkovich’s book, Depression: A Public Feeling, is a personal story of depression that speculates depression through a socially researched epistemology that values the feelings of depression as political. Depression confronts the rift between medical and cultural treatments of depression and the political nature of depression under these conditions. This book began from a simple proposition “That depression should be viewed as a social and cultural phenomenon, not a biological or medical one.” (90) Cvetkovich, a University of Texas professor further examines depression based on her own experience, a number of researchers, writers and artists. She aims to contribute to the conversation through “new ways of doing cultural studies that move

In the first chapter, the author contributes her cultural studies critiques of the medical representation of depression, while finding “new ways to describe feelings or the intersections of mind and body that encompass not just more cognitive forms of emotion but the embodied senses” (26) Cvetkovich then proclaims that depression is “too thin and undescriptive of a term.” (194) She questions the medical model of depression as distraught brain chemistry that is made evident in part through a failure of productivity. As well as including narrative to describe the medical representation, she also includes historical medical studies to find a spiritual crisis to explain the weariness or distress of heart. Using her studies, she helps her audience understand depression as meaningful and “a normative part of cultural experience and a creative force.” (107) Throughout the second chapter, Cvetkovich explains the roots of depression through historical legacies. She explains how the term depression was mainly used in white middle class subjects and not so much in racism, slavery, and segregation. These narratives address the struggle of depression dealing with class vulnerability and how it is “a source of melancholy or depression.” (150) She therefor challenges her audience “to practice radical self-possession and to recognize intimate histories of displacement and loss.”(152) Cvetkovich stated

In English Literature and a Professor of English and Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Ann Cvetkovich presents herself as a well-educated teacher, researcher and writer. “Her current writing projects focus on the current state of LGBTQ archives and the creative use of them by artists to create counter archives and interventions in public history.” (Ann Cvetkovich “Biography” 2013) This is displayed throughout Depression because of her goal to “craft a queer cultural analysis that accounts for depression as a historical category, a felt experience, and a point of entry into discussions about theory, contemporary culture, and everyday life.” Cvetkovich uses queer-culture examples, that shows the value of living is accepting and processing all emotions. She finds the sacred in the mundane. “There's no cure for depression, just as there's no cure for life, you live through it and you live it.” Cvetkovich adequately organized by chapter while offering reflections, endnotes and sources to attain the status of a credible research book. Depression also offers a representation for collaborative authorship; community of academics, activists, and artists. Cvetkovich organized her book in two separate parts so that the reader can differentiate between her memoir and the erudite research. Her understanding of the immensity of sources allowed her to intertwine these sources into her writing, without losing her own voice, and strengthen her