Apparatus XY

6 Therefore, it was important to find out what words were used in the thirty poems to indicate the kind of depression being expressed. I then created a way of analyzing my sample of poems by using the modern ideas about disordered depression and its symptoms as my lens. I also used the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual IV (DSM IV), with its symptomology of depression, to develop five criteria that denote where the poems could fall on a spectrum of emotions: sadness, depression and disordered depression. I then applied these criteria to the thirty poems, and it seems that the majority of women from this sample across this large span of a thousand years were suffering from disordered depression. To illustrate all these findings, I have chosen biographical data and poems of three women who lived in traditional China as my core examples. They and the other women seem to share similar ways of articulating their condition.

7 What becomes apparent is that despite temporal and spatial differences, there are articulations of emotions and depression that delineate a universal concept, which allows me to understand the connections between women and depression as manifested in their poems. There exists a universal phenomenology advancing the theory that disease, irrespective of its cultural label, is universally rooted in social experience, in distress and in human misery (Kleinman Social 4-10). Most humans have the same emotional spectrum as we are all biologically designed to experience loss, with the need to express it a universal constant. Human misery and distress are differentially molded by culture, but the root of the emotion is the same. Poetry is one type of cultural production in which the emotions expressed in a specific time and location can be traced and understood by another person hundreds of years later. This is why it is possible for me to read the selected poems and identify the poets' disordered depression.

8 The symptomology of disordered depression that is used in western psychiatry made up the core of my criteria that serve as the conceptual backdrop for considering the chosen poetry by women writers. First, I used the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual [version four] (DSM IV). Used all over the world by mental health professionals, it provides diagnostic tools to identify mental disorders. Disordered depression in the diagnostic criteria fits under the larger axis of Major Depressive Disorders (MDD). The classification of what qualifies as depression and what does not is complicated as the severity, intensity, and frequency of these diagnostic symptoms impact the diagnosis. According to the DSM, the person should be exhibiting at least three of the following nine symptoms for more than two weeks:

1. Changes in nutrition
2. Insomnia or over sleeping
3. Loss of energy and increased fatigue
4. Restless and/or irritable
5. Feelings of worthlessness or overwhelming guilt
6. Diminished interest in life
7. Difficulty concentrating or thinking
8. Sexual dysfunction
9. Thoughts of death or attempted suicide.(337)

9 Second, I used the definition of what a disorder actually is and see if the emotions expressed in the poems could indicate the poet being depressed. As defined by Psychiatrist Jerome Wakefield in his article, a pre-existing mental condition can turn into a disorder:

if and only if (a) the condition causes some harm or deprivation of benefit to the person as judged by the standards of the person's culture (the value criterion), and (b) the condition results from the inability of some mental mechanism to perform its natural function, wherein a natural function is an effect that is part of the evolutionary explanation of the existence and structure of the mental mechanism (the explanatory criterion). (386)

This definition provides two areas of analysis. As in (a) above, the poet has to be expressing some negative or harmful effects of their emotions to be considered depressed. Whether or not their culture would deem them depressed will be explored later in sections two and three of this project. As in (b) above, there has to be some reason for the disorder to exist. In Western psychiatric thought there are three reasons suggested for disordered depression: specific distressing life events, biochemical imbalance in the brain, and psychological factors like a negative or pessimistic view of life. Another idea is reliant on genetics, according to which depression is passed on through generations. It is impossible to know the genetics or biochemical imbalances of the women poets, but in their poems and short biographies we can detect the life events and psychological factors that did lead to their disordered depression.