AbstractsBiology & Animal Science

Postnatal depression (PND) is beginning to emerge into public healthcare policy and practice as a valid experience that fathers can suffer, rather than a solely female condition. Yet for mothers and fathers this ‘mute illness’ or ‘silent killer’, as it has been described, is still categorised in dual terms in the literature. For men, PND is considered to be primarily psycho-social in origin, and for women, the root cause is perceived as predominantly biological, due to fluctuating hormones after childbirth. This pattern seems to confirm an inherent duality between nature and culture, and male and female, and it promotes the body as somehow passive or reticent. Yet how can we justify such divisions when fathers’ bodies already evidence biological changes specific to the puerperal period - ones that seem, in a sense, related to interactive, social modes of being? Why, then, is the body regarded as silent? This thesis accounts for the intricate and poignant ways in which biology and sociality may be correlatively engaged by pursuing a lived embodiment of PND in fathers. In doing so, it aims to complicate other dualisms, such as mind/body, inside/outside and absence/presence, by asking if the body can inform us of how PND is corporealised and lived. Through exploring the performance of biological actors such as hormones, neurons, genitalia, and the brain, this thesis seeks to comprehend a few crucial ways in which the binary of nature and culture can be reconsidered and made more complex, more attentive to, and more telling of, somatic experience. Investigating the phenomena of empathy, hysteria, neuroplasticity and trans-cultural psychiatry, and conversing with key anthropological, sociological and feminist texts, these meditations ponder questions crucial to this task: what is embodiment? What constitutes the body? What materialises sex? How can we conceive of the originary? Promoting a bio-graphical approach to corporeality, this thesis explores how the body confirms itself as active, agentive and methodologically aware within a wider, constantly evolving ecology or systematicity. Indeed, by focusing on the specificities of fathers who experience PND, this study will also tell us something about being-in-the-world more generally.