In this book, Kelly M. Weikle argues that exploring postpartum depression through an identity perspective offers a unique and meaningful way to advance understanding of the condition and how to support women during the postpartum period.
The author explores how postpartum depression impacted women's identities and relationships through interviews with women who experienced postpartum depression. Furthermore, the author considers how societal messages of mothering identity impacted the individual experiences of women as they faced postpartum depression. These tensions and challenges can manifest through a number of health crises, including extreme anxiety and obsessions, intrusive thoughts of escape, bouts of insomnia, and intense feelings of overwhelm and maternal failure. Although many of the chiefly observed effects are medical in nature, Weikle goes further to examine the implications of these effects on mothering identity, including the loss of control and sense of self.
By using the Communication Theory of Identity as a sensitizing framework, the author unpacks how expectations from others, close personal relationships, dominant ideologies of good motherhood, and mental health coalesce to shape the postpartum period for mothers. Women experience identity gaps as they experience postpartum depression, and through understanding how and why these gaps manifest, researchers and professionals can develop more impactful support for postpartum women.
This book argues that using a communicative framework to explore identity manifestations and tensions during postpartum depression is critical to achieving a fuller understanding of the challenges women face as they become mothers.
Arvustused
Mothering touches all of us, and so we all benefit from this book about a commonly carried, yet rarely spoken, pain point. Sharing personal stories and scholarship with such compassion, clarity, and vulnerability, Weikle turns our heavy loneliness into floating hope! This book belongs on the shelf with the baby books, as it comforts a mom like she comforts the world! * Christine Kunkle, Professor of Communication Studies, West Virginia University, USA *
Muu info
In this book, Kelly M. Weikle contends that foregrounding lived experiences and applying identity as a lens to the study of postpartum depression provides a uniquely powerful perspective through which we can better understand both the condition and how to effectively support mothers during the postpartum period.
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Experiencing Postpartum Depression
2. The Changing Self: Personal Identity Amid Mothering and Postpartum
Depression
3. The Enacted Self: Enacting Motherhood and Postpartum Depression
4. The Collective Self: Communal Identity of a Postpartum Mother
5. The Relational Self: Messages from Others, Our Relationships, and the
Impacts on Mothering Identity Amid Postpartum Depression
6. Advancing our Understanding of Identity as Communicative
7. Where Do We Go from Here? Practical Implications for Healthcare Providers,
Scholars, Family Members, and Mothers
Afterword
Appendix
References
About the Author
Index
Kelly M. Weikle is a teaching assistant professor and interpretive identity communication scholar in the Department of Communication Studies at West Virginia University, USA.
