Resource description:
Abstract
Mental health of women is often looked at from a biomedical lens. Mental health issues resulting out of globalising economic and cultural
forces are generally neglected. This often implies that social problems are understood as individual problems. Increasingly discourses in
sociology and anthropology explore mental health in bio-cultural terms where social structural arrangements are said to contribute majorly to the phenomenon of psychosocial distress. There is a need to explore the ways in which the social and economic conditions which structure
women’s existence as part of poor urban households require attention. This article moves away from the mental illness paradigm through which distress of women is usually understood. With the help of narratives, it seeks to explore the distress of women in the context of the community they live in and the gender roles they negotiate.
By Mahima Nayar and Nilika Mehrotra
Article published in Psychology and Developing Societies Journal 2015