Experiences of depression: Diagnosis, resistance and out-of-tune embodiment

In this thesis, I examine the complex experiences of what we call depression in everyday life, the multifaceted and ambiguous experiences of getting a depression diagnosis, and the in-depth processes involved in learning to live under the description of depression. The thesis is based on ethnographic fieldwork among adults diagnosed with depression in Denmark, and consists of three articles that provide glimpses into experiences of depression and diagnostic processes. The articles deal with creativity, variability and resistance in diagnostic processes and illustrates how these not are once-and-for-all-dealt-with matters but rather messy and complicated processes, that involve several actors and multiple relations to the diagnosis. The thesis furthermore challenges the dominant diagnostic understanding depression as a neurobiological, and individual disorder in present-day diagnostic cultures, by arguing that depression primarily is experienced as a bodily and relational phenomenon in quotidian life.