Women and Depression: Recovery and Resistance By Michelle N. Lafrance (author) & Jane Ussher (series editor) Routledge. 2009. £16.95 (pb). 248pp. ISBN: 9780415404310

According to Michelle Lafrance, psychology, psychiatry and psychotherapy are ‘notorious for holding a myopic view of people's distress’, as they only look to neurochemical and cognitive models to explain depression. She challenges this approach in her book, one of a series entitled ‘Women and Psychology’. The book is based on in-depth interviews with women who have experienced depression and recovered. Lafrance interviewed 19 women from an eastern Canadian city, focusing on their recovery from depression, and undertook similar interviews with 14 women from a semi-rural area who attended a ‘Nurturing Ourselves’ workshop which focused on the ways in which they attended to their health and well-being in everyday life.

In the first chapter, Lafrance reviews the lives and experiences of women which, she argues, are the main drivers for depression: violence and abuse, poverty, care-giving and difficult relationships. I would argue that most mental health professionals are aware of the realities of the lives of many women with depression in relation to the issues she discusses.

The second chapter explores the analysis of her data in relation to recovery and in the third she addresses the self-care women undertook in order to remain well, which is often a struggle in the face of competing demands and societal views. In addition to discussing the themes emerging from these interviews, Lafrance also reviews and interweaves the background literature and main feminist and sociological theories relating to depression in women. The book draws to a close with a concluding chapter and there are appendices outlining Lafrance's methods.

As much of the recovery agenda in psychiatry focuses on severe mental illness, this book is a welcome gathering together of the detailed experiences of women who have suffered from depression, and the current theories and literature. Trainees will find it a good introduction to feminist and sociological theory in relation to women and depression and a welcome complementary text to all those biomedical ones. In addition to thinking about recovery, it will also provide an example of a qualitative research method, namely discourse analysis.