Disrupted Dialogues: Exploring Misgendered Diagnoses and Experiences of Melancholia and Depression Through the Lens of Pericles and Contemporary Psychiatric Practice

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article disrupts present-day readings of women’s experience of and diagnoses with depression by reading them in the light of the patriarchally inscribed experience of melancholia in the early modern period as explored in Shakespeare and Wilkins’ Pericles. It reads the paralleled experiences of Pericles and Marina and early modern proto-medical treatises in the light of contemporary psychiatric diagnostic practice and psychosocial research. It considers how norms, gendering, and privilege can affect the way an individual’s expression of their experience is read, received, diagnosed, and treated, as eroticised cures are laid against talking therapies in Pericles, and the gendered application of the labels of melancholia and depression and the gendered assumptions undergirding therapeutic interventions are probed. In so doing, it shows the value of reading early modern drama through a medical humanities lens to underline the biases which still have a measurable impact in mental health diagnostic settings today. The stark consequences of these biases for women emerge when these texts are brought into interdisciplinary and transhistorical dialogue. The early modern and present strands are pulled together by exploring how Pericles pushes back against the way gender can be leveraged to mistreat, exploit or silence.