Struggling with a depression diagnosis: Negotiations with diagnostic categories: Negotiations with diagnostic categories

In this article, I explore how an adult experiences and negotiates the process of being diagnosed with depression, and how she struggles to learn to live under this particular diagnostic description. It is based on two interviews with one informant, Bridget, being part of a larger ethnographic fieldwork in Denmark among adults diagnosed with depression. Psychiatric diagnoses are the most common categories used when suffering and life problems are to be understood, interpreted, and acted upon in Denmark. Bridget’s story is a case in which resistance against, and ongoing negotiations and complicated struggles with, a psychiatric diagnosis stand out, as she continuously struggles to articulate an oppositional stance to the dominant diagnostic categories. The negotiations take place in a complex network where medical authorities, the workplace and the diagnostic cultures play a crucial part when the depression diagnosis is negotiated. Bridget’s narrative exemplifies how a medical gaze comes to prevail, and a diagnostic language comes to dominate when one is to make sense of emotional distress. Bridget’s story gives a nuanced view of diagnostic processes and adds to our understanding of persons’ ongoing and changing responses to diagnostic labels over time.