Television News Coverage Of Postpartum Disorders and the Politics of Medicalization

Abstract

This article argues that although postpartum disorders can potentially disrupt the hegemonic discourse of essential/good motherhood, as represented in television news, such disorders are domesticated by the use of news routines and are defined as “real” diseases that are temporary disruptions in women's natural ability to mother. This understanding of postpartum disorders not only engages in a process of medicalizing what is often a social problem, but also reifies a particularly harmful understanding of motherhood. Television news coverage exemplifies the problematic ideological baggage attached to the diagnoses of postpartum depression and psychosis, and demonstrates the need for more diverse reporting of women's health issues.

Keywords:

• postpartum depression
• motherhood
• television news
• news routines
• medicalization

Notes

1. Television news reports were retrieved from the Vanderbilt Television News Archives. The Vanderbilt Archives include only evening news reports from ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN. Searching for the term “postpartum” returned twenty-eight reports during the years of 2000–2007. I chose 2000 as a starting point because it was the year before the Yates trial. A search from the years available before the Yates case (1968–1999) returned only three reports.

2. My concern in this project is charting the dominant, or “preferred,” meanings for postpartum disorders constructed within television news. I recognize that television audiences are active audiences, for, as Press and Cole suggest, audiences offer a variety of readings—dominant, negotiated, and oppositional—in response to any given televisual text, including those about women's health issues (1999, p. 5). Because I am interested in how television can “set the parameters for the debate” about postpartum disorders, I offer not an audience analysis but a textual analysis concerned with the purpose of and strategies used within news texts about postpartum disorders (Dow 1996, pp. 8–9). That said, I do want to emphasize that the meanings made within television news become “active forces” in women's lives—forces that “interact with thoughts and actions of particular persons, sometimes contradicting and sometime supporting their beliefs and experiences” (Press & Cole 1999, p. 3). Representations of postpartum disorders in the news have “real world” or material consequences. Although I cannot chart those consequences, I do feel justified—given the ample research on the ways in which health discourse in the media is “taken up” by individuals (see, for example, Hendricks 2002; Jeong 2007; Weaver 2004)—to offer arguments about potential implications of such representations.

3. This number reflects the women whose stories were used as anecdotal evidence supporting the existence and seriousness of postpartum disorders. This number excludes women who served as the focus of a story: Andrea Yates, Mary Ellen Moffitt, and Dena Schlosser.