The formal diagnosis of adult major depressive disorder emerged in the 1970s in the context of research with medication, though disagreement about whether children could experience depression was not resolved until the 1980s and 1990s. Many critics and scholars have interrogated the construction of psychiatric diagnosis in the United States. This talk will attend to the relationships that formed the backdrop in depression research, especially between depressed mothers and their rebellious sons. In the process of creating purportedly objective categories of illness, relationship dynamics were redefined as genetic propensity, while the brain was located as a value-neutral site, away from social context.

Laura Hirshbein, MD, PhD is the George E Wantz MD Distinguished Professor of the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan. She is a professor in the Department of Psychiatry and director of the Program of the History of Medicine and Public Health within the Center for History, Humanities, the Arts, Social Sciences, and Ethics of Medicine (CHHASSEM).

She has published two books (American Melancholy in 2009 and Smoking Privileges in 2013), and her third book is forthcoming from Columbia University Press (Troubled). She is editor-in-chief of the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences.