Screening, diagnosing and medicating depression: Psychiatric methods and the making of mental disorder

This is a commentary on Vaswani, Karter, Cosgrove, Peters, and Brodt's (2018) article “Depression Screening During Pregnancy and the Postpartum Period: Enhancing Informed Consent Practices.” Here I reflect on feminist perspectives on mental illness, as not confined to the individual but situated in a societal and cultural context. I discuss the social construction of categories of mental disorders and the construction of “objective” screening measures used to diagnose individuals. Technoscientific practices and psychiatric methods are critical political sites that warrant close scrutiny.