Therapy-speak and the Biomedical Self: Performing Depression in David Foster Wallace’s “The Depressed Person”

Abstract

David Foster Wallace’s “The Depressed Person” (1999) offers a glimpse into the late twentieth-century therapeutic culture in America by reproducing the linguistic and ideological frameworks through which depression is diagnosed and narrated. Drawing on Deborah Cameron’s concept of verbal hygiene and Judith Butler’s theory of performativity, this paper examines the linguistic performance of therapy-speak, which regulates the articulation of depression and shapes the protagonist’s identity in the narrative. By reading the story through Suman Fernando’s critique of psychiatric universalism, the paper situates Wallace’s narrative within the epistemological framework of biomedicine to discuss how depression is framed as endogenous and displaced from its social and political contexts. Together, the paper reads “The Depressed Person” as a critique of therapeutic discourse that fails to recognize the ethical and social dimensions of mental illness and gestures towards the need for forms of speech and listening that exist beyond the language of pathology.