Distorted Thinking or Distorted Realities? The Social Construction of Anxiety for Women in Neoliberal Late-Stage Capitalism

Abstract

AbstractAnxiety disorders are one of the most prevalent mental disorders globally, and 63% of those diagnoses are of women. Although widely acknowledged across health disciplines and news and social media outlets, the majority of attention has left assumptions underlying women's anxiety in the twenty-first century unquestioned. Drawing on my own experiences of anxiety, I will the explore both concept and diagnosis in the Western world. Reflecting on my own experiences through a critical feminist lens, I will investigate the construction of anxiety as mental disorder in the context of neoliberal late-stage capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and biomedical psychiatry. Tracing the postpositivistic foundations of anxiety, as well as the historical and ongoing medicalization and pathologization of women, I will critically consider the sociopolitical implications of constructing anxiety as biomedical disorder. Assumptions underlying mental health will be explored within the context of the construction, experience, and operationalization of gender and the way gender intersects with diverse positionalities, power, knowledge, and neoliberal governance. Weaving the voices of women poets with the biomedical language of disorder, this critical-realist inquiry will explore my anxiety as it relates to the epidemic levels of anxiety among other women, and the late-stage capitalist world within which anxiety flourishes.