Crying Out Loud: Understanding Women’s Emotional Distress as both Lived Experience and Social Construction

Abstract

This article examines some of the issues involved in developing research strategies that are robust enough to attend to the complex relationship between gender and emotional distress. Social constructionism may be helpful because it highlights the discursive production of power, femininity and psychopathology. The strength of a phenomenological approach is that it emphasizes the richness and complexity of an individual’s lived experience and privileges agency. Working towards a rapprochement between these two approaches may help to deconstruct the stories that have been told about women and mental illness and help to generate more meaningful information about women’s experiences of emotional distress.