Black Dogs and Blue Words: Depression and Gender in the Age of Self-Care

(Rutgers University Press) The author analyzes the rhetoric surrounding depression. She argues that the language and techniques of depression marketing strategies target women and young girls, encouraging self-diagnosis and self-medication. Depression narratives and other texts, she argues, encode a series of gendered messages about health and illness, and she suggests that health care consumers should use rhetorical reading strategies in response to such expanding and gendered definitions of illness. Emmons is an associate professor of English and director of composition at Case Western Reserve University. She has contributed to medical rhetoric collections and writing journals.