Dariusz Galasin´ski
email: d.galasinski@wlv.ac.uk

Constructions of the self in interaction with the Beck Depression Inventory

Keywords: BDI, depression, discourse, experience, psychiatric tests, psychiatry

In this article, I am interested in discourses of people completing the Polish version of the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI). I focus upon the negotiation of the spaces for constructing the self opened by the BDI. My corpus consists of transcripts of 50 sessions in which self-reportedly healthy people were asked to 'think aloud' while completing the BDI. I shall demonstrate that in interactions with the 'depression scale', the informants mostly rejected the spaces offered by it. Three strategies of such rejection are discussed: reformulation, recontextualization and an explicit challenge to the categories offered by the BDI. I shall argue that the concerns of lived experience in a particular context, when not subdued by the relationship of power in the situation of medical examination, overrule the frame imposed by the a-contextual questionnaire of sadness. Insight into depression or its intensity offered by 'context-free' psychological or psychiatric instrument, set outside lived experience, is extremely problematic.

health: 12(4) depression [START_REF] Beck | Assessment of depression[END_REF], it consists of 21 items, each to be answered by questions ranked from 0 to 3, representing severity levels from no symptom to the most severe.

The psychiatric literature on the BDI focuses mostly upon its psychometric features, quoting the level of its reliability and validity (e.g. [START_REF] Beck | Psychometric properties of the Beck Depression Inventory[END_REF][START_REF] Schotte | Construct validity of the Beck Depression Inventory in a depressive population[END_REF] and commonly applauds them (see e.g. [START_REF] Nezu | Assessment of depression[END_REF]. Criticisms are relatively infrequent and focus mostly on what exactly the Inventory measures. [START_REF] Coyne | Self-reported stress: Analog or ersatz depression[END_REF] suggests for example that the BDI might measure the level of general psychological distress rather than severity of depression and points out that the scores of BDI can be reduced drastically a few days after admission to hospital, despite the fact that the patient might not have received any signifi cant treatment [START_REF] Van Praag | Interconvertability of fi ve self-report measures of depression[END_REF][START_REF] Katz | The assessment of severity and symptom patterns in depression[END_REF]. Endler and his associates (2000) point out that the BDI might measure trait-like depression and, signifi cantly, different aspects and levels of depression in clinical and non-clinical samples. In addition, Richter and his associates (1998) also indicate, among others, high item diffi culties or doubtful objectivity of interpretation. Finally, there are also reports that the BDI might be interacted with differently, depending on gender and age of those who complete it (e.g. [START_REF] Page | Gender and reporting differences in measures of depression[END_REF][START_REF] Wallace | Age-related differences in the symptomatic expression of major depression[END_REF][START_REF] Aben | Validity of the Beck Depression Inventory, Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale, SCL-90, and Hamilton Depression Rating Scale as screening instruments for depression in stroke patients[END_REF]; see also [START_REF] Steer | Dimensions of the Beck Depression Inventory-II in clinically depressed patients[END_REF].

However, such criticisms are made predominantly within the parameters set by the discourses of quantitatively oriented psychiatry and clinical psychology, taking an explicitly positivist research perspective. It assumes that questionnaires can gauge a 'psychological reality' of or in the people who complete them. They are looked at only as instruments that are to provide researchers with data of 'good quality' and thus must be clear, accurate, complete, logical and must compute well [START_REF] Gillham | Developing a questionnaire[END_REF]; also [START_REF] Conrad | Verbal reports are data! A theoretical approach to cognitive interviews[END_REF].

Interestingly, even though there is some literature interrogating psychological and psychiatric instruments qualitatively (e.g. [START_REF] Morse | From theory to practice: The development of assessment guides from qualitatively derived theory[END_REF][START_REF] Gilgun | Qualitative methods and the development of clinical assessment tools[END_REF], there is very little literature looking at them as socially situated texts (e.g. [START_REF] Drennan | Hidden dimensions of power and resistance in the translation process[END_REF]. However, I have found practically no literature approaching such instruments as institutionally empowered texts with which those who complete them enter into interaction and thus as texts which open up interaction spaces within which the person must fi nd her/himself within [START_REF] Koze ˜owska | ¯yae bezrobociem: Analiza dyskursu bezrobotnych [Living unemployment. An analysis of the discourse of the unemployed[END_REF]. A notable exception is a recent study by [START_REF] Barroso | In the fi eld with the Beck Depression Inventory[END_REF] in which the authors interrogate the BDI in view of the interactions one of them had while administrating the questionnaire. They point out not only the diffi culty their informants had with the BDI, but also the fact that their experience of depression could not be squared to fi t into the scale. A disadvantage of this signifi cant study is lack of a systematic insight into the discourses of those challenging the BDI, and focusing on the shortcomings of the instrument. In this article, I am going to reverse the perspective and focus upon those who were completing the scale.

Aims

I am interested here in how people asked to complete the BDI enter into interaction with it, how they negotiate the questionnaire and, more particularly, how they discursively negotiate the spaces the text afforded the respondent for constructing her/himself and her/his experience. Exploring the ways in which the self is constructed in interaction with the BDI, I am also interested in the implicit power relations within the interaction and what they mean for lived experience of mental illness (that is what people make of their illness).

The study

The research this article is based upon is part of a larger study into respondents' experiences of depression scales, and in this article I am focusing upon interactions with the Beck Depression Inventory. A convenience sample of 52 self-reportedly healthy men and women, and with no incidence of psychiatric care, were asked to complete the BDI and 'think aloud' while doing it. 1 The sessions were carried out by 2nd-year students of the Warsaw School of Social Psychology studying for an MA in psychology, who also were those to approach the informants with a request for an interview. The decision to ask students to contact the informants and administer the questionnaire resulted from my wish to create as non-face-threatening a research context as possible, and thus one conducive to engaging with the instrument. The young researchers were unlikely to have been perceived as in a position of signifi cant power over the informants. All interviews were recorded and transcribed. I hope it will be clear in the course of this article that the informants' choices were psychopathologically meaningless; their 'scores' were therefore ignored.

The informants were chosen on the basis of their age (young and elderly), education (with primary/vocational and at least an MA in a discipline of the social sciences) and domicile (living in villages/small towns and in large cities). There were four groups of informants: (1) young, educated living in cities; (2) elderly, uneducated living in small towns or villages;

(3) elderly, educated living in cities; (4) young, uneducated living in small towns or villages. They were told that they were participating in a study on how people fi ll out questionnaires such as the one they were about to complete and they were asked to 'think aloud' while doing it. During the session, those administering the BDI were instructed not to engage in any interaction with the informants. Thus, even in cases of being directly addressed by the informants with any issues concerning the research, the researchers were instructed not to answer them and limit their responses to the information from the beginning of the session.

By asking the informants to 'think aloud', I refer to the fact that people occasionally speak to themselves, and/or to other people, while doing health: 12(4) something. It is a social and discursive practice consisting in commenting upon or explaining one's actions as those actions are being done. Although it does not have to, the practice may involve interacting with those observing the activity. I decided to keep the term, rather than change it to something more 'scientifi c' such as 'on-line commentary' or the like, not only to refl ect that I tried to anchor the research within an existing social practice, making my research more 'ecological', but also to make it more intelligible for my informants. For them what they were asked to do was 'thinking aloud'. Needless to say, using the term I do not wish to claim that in the process we tapped into the informants' underlying thoughts. This is in sharp contrast to pre-testing techniques in psychological research and as a cognitive interview technique. On-line commentary is used to test the contents and the design of questionnaires. Informants are asked to report on their understanding of questions and options given and emotions towards them, or to comment on potential omissions (e.g. [START_REF] Blair | Survey procedures for conducting cognitive interviews to pretest questionnaires: A review of theory and practice[END_REF][START_REF] Gray | Developing a questionnaire to measure the psychosocial impact of an abnormal cervical smear result and its subsequent management[END_REF]. Such sessions are also claimed to provide insight into the informants' underlying thinking (e.g. [START_REF] Ericsson | Protocol analysis: Verbal reports as data[END_REF][START_REF] Conrad | Verbal reports are data! A theoretical approach to cognitive interviews[END_REF]. I wish to make no such claims.

The request to 'think aloud' while completing the BDI was the only instruction given to the informants. I thus attempted to get the respondents to take on the identity of informants trying to negotiate their 'interests', their 'real' answers, with the choices they were offered by the instrument. It is important to note that the technique, which was used in a qualitative 'replication' of a questionnaire [START_REF] Koze ˜owska | ¯yae bezrobociem: Analiza dyskursu bezrobotnych [Living unemployment. An analysis of the discourse of the unemployed[END_REF], resulted from a spontaneous commentary during completing of a questionnaire by informants, rather than from an instruction. My research attempts to capitalize on what Koze ˜owska observed as a social need to comment and account for questionnaire choices.

In the research I used the Polish version of the Beck Depression Inventory (e.g. Bilikiewicz et al., 2002: 511-13; also available as a hospital resource, published as promotional material for Lerivon, an anti-depressant medication), which is based upon the fi rst edition of the BDI. The Inventory consists of 21 items, all with 4 options, numbered from 0 to 3, with 0 consistently indicating no depressive symptoms (yet, nil score on the scale still indicates depression, see later) and 3 the most severe ones (but see the critique of the language of the scale suggesting that in fact it is not a scale at all, Galasin ´ski, 2008). The items gauge the severity of such symptoms as sadness, pessimism, sense of failure, self-dissatisfaction, guilt, punishment, self-dislike, self-accusations, suicidal ideas (items 1-9; see also [START_REF] Beck | Beck Depression Inventory II[END_REF] and others.

Theoretical assumptions

Methodologically, the article is anchored in the constructionist view of discourse underpinned by the assumptions of the critically oriented discourse analysis. I assume that social reality is constructed through and within language and that every language use designed to represent reality necessarily entails decisions as to which aspects of that reality to include, and decisions as to how to arrange them. Each of these selections, both in content and the lexico-grammatical form, made in the construction of a message carries its share of these ingrained values, so that the reality represented is ideologically constructed (Hodge and Kress, 1993: 5). It is also through discourse (i.e. practices of language use) that language users constitute social realities: their knowledge of social situations, the interpersonal roles they play, their identities and relations with other interacting social groups [START_REF] Van Leeuwen | Legitimizing immigration control[END_REF]. No text, spoken or written, including such 'scientifi c' instruments as questionnaires, presents reality in a neutral or objective way; representation is never of reality 'as it really is', rather it is always looking at it through the tinted lens of ideological assumptions (e.g. [START_REF] Fairclough | Discourse and social change[END_REF][START_REF] Van Dijk | Principles of Critical Discourse Analysis[END_REF][START_REF] Halliday | Introduction to functional grammar[END_REF][START_REF] Barker | Cultural studies and discourse analysis[END_REF].

In my analysis I focus on both the content and the form of the message, relating it to the larger socio-political context in which they are used. Also, each act of analysis carries with it a decision regarding which of the aspects of the message to focus upon as the most relevant in constructing the realities under consideration. Using both the systemic-linguistic analysis [START_REF] Halliday | Introduction to functional grammar[END_REF] as well as a hermeneutic-like interpretation of discourses in terms of the context in which they were submerged (see [START_REF] Titscher | Methods of text and discourse analysis[END_REF], I am attempting to reach the ideological underpinnings of the informants' experiences.

I am not interested in discourses used in designing the questionnaire (see also [START_REF] Galasiñski | Men's discourses of depression[END_REF]. Rather, I am interested in discourses produced by informants as a result of dealing with an imposed version of reality. Thus, I want to approach the issue from the opposite end to what has been done so far. I want to take the perspective of the respondent and their experiences of having to deal with the institutionally empowered instrument designed to gauge their state of emotions and mind. To my knowledge there has been no research exploring the issue. Studies such as Houtkoop-Steenstra's (2000; also [START_REF] Suchman | Interactional troubles in face-to-face survey interviews[END_REF][START_REF] Antaki | Quality of life' talk: The liberal paradox of psychological testing[END_REF][START_REF] Antaki | D'you like a drink then do you?': Dissembling language and the construction of an impoverished life[END_REF] analysis of interaction in survey interviews explore standardized instruments, which are designed for interaction between the researcher and the respondent. In contrast I am taking on board an instrument that has not been designed for such interaction.

The experience of the BDI

There were three kinds of responses to the BDI's items. First, there were those where the informants accepted the item's requirement and made their choices accordingly, minimally narrating what they were doing. Second, there were those where the informants did not offer any comment (in fact health: 12(4) there were a few interviews in which the informants offered barely any comment at all). Such responses must be taken only as indicating that the informant would not make comment, rather than that s/he found the item/s acceptable. These two types of response accounted for a small minority of all the responses. Third, there were those which the informants found problematic, unacceptable. These were instances where the experience of the informant could not be framed by the BDI. In this article I am focusing solely on this kind of response. There were three strategies with which the informants coped with the BDI. When they chose to interact with it, they reformulated the instrument's items in the way that suited them or, alternatively, they recontextualized the BDI and provided the context that allowed them to challenge the instrument's categories. On the other hand, some informants chose to construct the instrument as one with which one cannot interact and rejected it altogether. This was a blanket contestation of the BDI as inappropriate for one reason or another.

In my analysis I was interested in the discursive 'fi t' between what the items demanded from the informant and what the informant actually decided to do with such demand. Just as with any communicative action designed to elicit a response, the items of a diagnostic instrument demand a particular answer. They project a 'demand', the meeting of which makes the response relevant (on relevance and conversational demand see, for example, [START_REF] Dascal | Conversational relevance[END_REF][START_REF] Holdcroft | Conversational relevance[END_REF]. Thus, the BDI, as other instruments, requires one not merely to make a choice from a selection provided, but also, implicitly, demands that the response is underpinned by the assumptions made in the question/item.

The three strategies I have identifi ed subsume all those answers of the informants in which this was not the case. In other words, there was a hiatus between what the items demanded from the respondent and what s/he did in her/his account of what s/he was doing.

However, rejecting the instrument's relevancies is done at different levels in the three strategies. In the fi rst one, the informants choose to ignore the demand projected by the item; the strategy is identifi ed on the basis of a semantic relationship between the item and the response. It can be seen in terms of pretence [START_REF] Galasiñski | The language of deception[END_REF] in that while providing a semantically irrelevant response, the informants maintain the pretence of co-operative completion of the instrument. The other two strategies offer an explicit challenge to the instrument in that they problematize its items. In the second strategy, the respondents re-interpret the items in different contexts, pointing out that they cannot be seen outside a particular context, while the third strategy rejects the items completely. Importantly, despite these challenges, the informants chose to co-operate at the basic level of fi lling out the BDI (see also later).

Reformulations

The fi rst strategy I am going to discuss is reformulations and consists of responses in which the informants answer a different question from the one posed by the BDI. The informants re-constructed the items and the questions became those which the informants wanted to answer, rather than those which the BDI asked.

However, by suggesting that what the informants did is strategic, I am implicitly proposing that what they said was serving the goal of not engaging with the BDI as it was likely to be designed, and thus their strategy was deceptive or manipulative. Such an assumption is problematic. I have no evidence to suggest that this is the only explanation for what happened. It may well have been that the informants understood the items in a particular way and answered to the best of their understanding. Either way, however, the situation is quite unacceptable from the point of view of a quantitative instrument. Consider the following. Item 12 in the BDI, gauging the level of social withdrawal was not meant to apply to people who lost interest in others because they had a new baby in the family. It was placed into the context of the informant's experience and she chose to mark a high score on the social withdrawal item. The extract shows the extent to which there is a mismatch between the BDI and the way the informant reformulates an item. The application of the scale in the local context of the informant's life reconstructs the way the item can be understood and thus interacted with. And the new baby is quite enough to overrule the relevancies of the BDI by the concerns of the day.

In the next two pairs of extracts I would like to show both how the informants interacted with an item, as well as the differences between them. The following two extracts are both made in reaction to item 14, Body Image Change. 3 Extract 2 BC, female, young, 'uneducated', town Indeed, I do worry that I look old or unattractive. I always think whether I am well dressed or not. Is it hip or not? And I worry, like in the question, that I look old and unattractive and I am thinking whether I look good, whether I am hip or well dressed at all, so I do pay attention to it. Not only did neither informant take the item as it was likely to be meantthus as one gauging the level of satisfaction with one's body -but they also differed in their understandings. MU takes the question in terms of her economic situation -she cannot afford to take care of herself; BC on the other hand interprets it in terms of her 'fashion judgement', both reformulating the question to refl ect their experiences. The two women supply their own relevancies and their own contexts in the interaction with the questionnaire, the relevancies most likely related to their age and, possibly, gender.

Interestingly, both informants take over the linguistic form of the option they choose: 'I worry that I look old and unattractive'. They both 'worry' (martwic ´ sie ˛), still they subvert the item. The space offered by the BDI is rejected and the informants offer a reformulation thereof. Yet, despite the rejection, they both opted for option 1, which suggests that they might present some symptoms of depression, even though, in view of their comments, their choices on the questionnaire are just about meaningless.

Similarly, it is primarily the context of age that underpins the following two responses to the item gauging Loss of Libido (item 21).

Extract 4

BC, female, young, 'uneducated', town I am not particularly interested in the sexual problem for the time being. I don't think about it, I have not got a boyfriend, so somehow I have not thought about it, so even though I am of certain age, I am not concerned, I am not interested. Somehow, I have not thought about it, even though my [girl] friends do have boyfriends.

Extract 5

PK, male, old, 'educated', city I am less interested in the issues of gender and sex and so on, and it results from, well, the age, and, obviously, that at present there is the unfavourable situation for men, 50 per cent, as they say on TV, have problems with the prostate, so this kind of thing happened to me.

While BC understands the questions aimed at probing into loss of libido as those about her interest in forming relationships (she still chooses option 2: 'Sexual problems are distinctly of less interest to me'!), PK understands it in terms of his ability to engage in sexual activity. Both reformulate the intended meaning of the item to refl ect their own concerns.

It is perhaps worth noting that the instrument assumes that people have a 'healthy' appetite for sex. Within the world of the BDI, one cannot answer the question of whether one is interested in sex with 'well, it depends with whom'. It does not feature all sorts of reasons why people might be less interested in sex: illness, religion and other convictions, arduous lifestyle, or simply might not want it at all!

Recontextualizations

The informants also recontextualized the BDI items. They explicitly provided a context for items that were problematic for them. So, while in reformulations the informants took the item to mean something different from what was intended, here, they understood it in the intended way, yet, they showed its limitations. This is a strategy in which the BDI was constructed as a-contextual, an instrument in its own world with little contact with the 'real' one. Witness the following extracts.

Extract 6

DW, female, old, educated, city (responding to item 7, Self-Dislike)

One is never fully happy with oneself. One always thinks one could be better, could do better, could be prettier, be healthier, could be something, I don't know, I am not particularly interested in wealth.

Extract 7

BO, male, young, 'uneducated', town (responding to item 6, Punishment)

Looking from the point of view of the faith, every man deserves punishment. No one is sin free and everybody commits sins. And everybody deserves the punishment to a degree. And it depends on what kind of sins we commit, that kind of punishment we shall have, right? I think I deserve punishment. I think I deserve punishment.

Both informants chose to see the items in broad philosophical and religious contexts, invalidating thereby their points. If you cannot ever be happy with yourself, there is little point in asking whether you are; if you always deserve punishment, there is little point in asking whether you do. By recontextualizing the items, the informants not only invalidate them, but, more generally, they undermine the very basis upon which a questionnaire such as the BDI is founded: the possibility of asking a question of immensely complex experiences, which will be understood in a uniform way by people regardless of who they are, what outlook on life they have, what kind of experiences they have had. While reformulations cast doubt upon such a possibility implicitly, recontextualizations undermine the scale explicitly.

health: 12(4)

The two strategies of interacting with the scale are a lived translation of the academic arguments against standardized probes into people's experiences (e.g. [START_REF] Potter | Discourse and social psychology: Beyond attitudes and behaviour[END_REF][START_REF] Speer | Natural' and 'contrived' data: A sustainable distinction?[END_REF]. Implicitly, therefore, a recontextualization is also a contestation of the scale, a rejection of the intrument and its assumptions. But the informants also contested the scale explicitly.

Challenging the BDI

There are two ways in which the informants contested the BDI. First, they explicitly challenged the items as problematic, unanswerable. Second, they rejected the scale altogether. Witness fi rst the following two extracts in which the informants challenge the Sense of Failure (item 3) and Pessimism (item 2) items, respectively. The informants explicitly challenge the items for being unclear, impossible to answer. But in the context of a medical or psychological interview, they would not have had the luxury of voicing their problems, there is a sheet to mark, and whatever their misgivings about the answerability of the items, each item must be scored -and yet, it is diffi cult to see the meaning of the score in the situation when the respondent thinks s/he cannot answer the question.

But the challenge launched by the informants went further. In the next extract, the informant explicitly rejects the validity of asking certain questions. Witness: Extract 10 PP, male, old, educated, city (responding to item 14, Body Image Change) You can't make one feel so down. I mean, damn it, everyone has been born, even the one most fucked up, a man, twisted, broken, head between his legs, but even he wants to live and he himself values himself. You can see it often.

What is most interesting in the rejection by PP is that he positions the item as a potential trigger for low mood. The BDI is constructed not so much as asking about things, but, rather, as suggesting them. This crippled, twisted person in PP's utterance has a right not to be reminded about his or her disfi gurement, his or her dissatisfaction. This rejection, made on the basis of humanity and rules of social conduct, is particularly forceful because of the initial nie moz ˙na ('one must not'), a phrase referring to a general, acontextual rule. One just does not do this kind of thing, the informant can be interpreted to say.

The last extract and others unquoted here raise all sorts of methodological, clinical and ethical issues. The BDI (and like instruments) must be seen as imposing the clinician's frame of reference upon the experience of the patient with an almost complete disregard to that particular experience. The patient is asked to answer the questions constructed by the psychiatrist, posed by the psychiatrist and of interest to the psychiatrist. There is no possibility of negotiating the 'illness narrative' [START_REF] Kleinman | The illness narrative[END_REF][START_REF] Frank | The wounded story-teller[END_REF], one which is far from set once and for all, but, rather, social, contextdriven and rhetorical [START_REF] Radley | Accounts of health and illness[END_REF].

Finally, the extracts in this and previous sections show that the patient's (or respondent's) interaction is riddled with relations of power. Medical questionnaires are invested with much institutional, and particularly, medical power; they are not to be questioned, but to be fi lled in without the possibility of negotiation or rejection. The research reported here encouraged negotiation and commentary on what the informants were doing, and reformulations, recontextualizations and challenges were frequent. But, importantly, regardless of the strategy of interacting with the scale, the informants still made marks on the article upon which the questionnaire was printed! In the last two extracts, this power of the instrument was highlighted explicitly. One informant objected to the liberties taken by the item; the other resisted by ticking a different option from the one she might have wanted to select. But the ultimate challenge to the questionnaire's power, however, was actually changing it, crossing out words that offered a position impossible to take, an action actually taken by a few informants. There is little doubt that such actions would not have taken place in 'real life', in front of a psychiatrist; or perhaps especially in front of a psychiatrist.

Discussion

In this article I set out to show how people interact with the Beck Depression Inventory. I have discussed three strategies in which people coped with problematic items. They reformulated them -answering different questions from those posed by the instrument. They recontextualized them -providing such contexts in which the items were rendered nonsensical. Finally, they contested the scale, rejecting it altogether. I have argued that the study showed lived evidence for a sizeable literature arguing health: 12(4) against standardized psychological and psychiatric instruments as silencing people's voices expressing their experiences. Now, my initial expectation was that it would be only the better educated social scientists who would reject at least some of the BDI's items, while the rest of the informants would be largely co-operative in completing the instrument, either fi nding it too face-threatening to challenge the questionnaire or simply playing the game and expediting the process. I was wrong in these expectations. I have found no patterns in how the informants interacted with the questionnaire, regardless of the level of their education, age and domicile. The three strategies were used by three groups without signifi cant change in the level of rejection of the instrument or the kinds of strategies that were employed. In other words, all the informants rejected the items, or the assumptions that did not allow them to complete the questionnaire in a way that they considered accurately rendering their experience.

But I can see at least three signifi cant reservations that can be made against my argument. First, my research was carried out with self-reportedly healthy people outside of the medical context, whereas the BDI is an instrument explicitly designed to gauge the severity of an already diagnosed depression and to be administered by a clinician. Second, the BDI is only one of a plethora of psychiatric instruments and cannot be seen outside the context of the patient's full examination. Third, whatever the problems, it actually works; people who get better while undergoing therapy score better on the BDI. Moreover, it correlates with other measures and thus can be shown independently that it works. Incidentally, such reservations have been raised in my discussions with practising psychiatrists and psychologists.

Of course, I am not claiming to be able to deal with all the issues resulting from the problems I am going to discuss; they go right to the heart of psychopathological research and diagnosis by standardized instruments. Thus I am attempting to show the possible reservations as problematic and unobvious and propose my comments as a platform from which further research and critical refl ection is needed.

BDI and interaction with healthy people

What is crucial here is that the BDI assumes a nil score. The problem is that even the nil score is still taken to indicate depression [START_REF] Beck | Beck Depression Inventory II[END_REF] -most likely because the primary goal of the BDI is to gauge the severity of depression in those already diagnosed. The consequences of such a stipulation are quite profound. For if the nil score still means depression, then either the scale does not gauge the severity of the symptoms, or it is a scale whose (at least ancillary) aim is that of confi rming and thus coconstructing depression, regardless of the merits of the diagnosis, a position untenable in view of a relatively large body of literature on the problems faced by psychiatric diagnosis, including Beck's own classical studies [START_REF] Beck | Reliability of psychiatric diagnoses: A critique of systematic studies[END_REF][START_REF] Beck | Reliability of psychiatric diagnoses: A study of consistency of clinical judgments and ratings[END_REF], see also Kleinman, 1988a;[START_REF] Caplan | Bias in psychiatric diagnosis[END_REF][START_REF] Sadler | Values and psychiatric diagnosis[END_REF].

Yet, in view of the scale itself, the nil score must actually mean 'no depression', as it is constructed in terms of denying symptoms (in itself extremely problematic, [START_REF] Galasiñski | Men's discourses of depression[END_REF] and it is taken to mean this in quite a number of studies in which it is used in detecting possible depression in non-clinical populations [START_REF] Lasa | The use of the Beck Depression Inventory to screen for depression in the general population: A preliminary analysis[END_REF][START_REF] Dutton | Use of the Beck Depression Inventory-II with African American primary care patients[END_REF]. Quite obviously such research assumes the possibility of getting non-depressed people to complete the scale and it would be implausible to assume that everybody whose score is nil is depressed. There is no reason why the nonclinical scale examined in this research should be seen as signifi cantly different.

Second, the reservation implicitly assumes that the BDI works only in medical or quasi-medical (clinical psychological) contexts. If its respondents must necessarily be ill, then the BDI is actually an instrument of coconstructing the sick role, reinforcing it and providing a hurdle for the patients in depression to clear in their attempts to shed it. Moreover, it assumes that there is a 'right' way of completing the questionnaire and it depends on the patient's sharing the discourse of psychiatry, or at least the discourse of the testing session and understanding what exactly is meant by the questions, and what kind of answers are expected of them. This, in turn, relies on medicalization of the patient's experience of 'professionalization' of patienthhood. Indeed, the responses of the informants suggest that they are not familiar with the notion of a depression scale, and they reject the idea that it is possible to square their experiences into a frame provided by the BDI.

The BDI in the context of the entirety of the patient's experience

The second reservation might be that the doctor or therapist should see the BDI score in the larger context of the information on the patient. Admittedly, also such a score cannot be seen outside the larger context of the entire doctor-patient interaction and other diagnostic tools at the disposal of the clinician. Now, as much as discourse is context-dependent (how what is said is meant or understood depends on the context), it is also context-renewing (i.e. what is said infl uences the context). Test scores are not only to be viewed within the context of the clinician's story of the patient, they also co-construct the story. It is implausible to assume that clinicians who administer such tests as the BDI, do it only to reject them because of the 'wider context'. Indeed, it is equally implausible to assume that there is some true and complete knowledge of the patient that can be seen as the ultimate context in which to view such measures, one to which the scores of standardized measures do not contribute. The doctor's knowledge of human experience (extremely complex and diffi cult to pin down, even for the most experienced clinicians, as acknowledged also by mainstream health: 12(4) psychiatry, see, for example, [START_REF] Zimmerman | Interview guide for evaluating DSM-IV psychiatric disorders and the mental status examination[END_REF], is discursive, contextual and subject to change, probably at a moment's notice, depending on, among others, test scores.

Moreover, the assumption that such contexts exist presumes a certain transparency of the patient. It assumes that the patient's symptoms can be 'read off', or as Verhaeghe (2004: 197) puts it, they can be 'extracted' from the patient, whose story is actually hindering the clinicians' task. Not only is the knowledge of the patient ever-provisional (even if the institutions provide means to reify it, for example in the form of patient notes), but it is gathered through interaction which is as much imbued with power relations and 'face' concerns as any other social situation. Patients are not transparent actors saying the truth, only the truth and nothing but the truth. Face concerns might be an overarching contextual consideration for the patient.

But it works!

Finally, one could argue that, social and discursive critiques notwithstanding, the BDI and other such measures simply work and do offer insight into the patients' condition and recovery. After all, people have different scores during and after therapy -indeed improving BDI scores are taken to be evidence of therapy's effectiveness (e.g. [START_REF] Grant | Cognitive behavioural therapy[END_REF]. So, the argument continues: people might not exactly know what the author meant; still, they are able to fi ll in the scale consistently and one is able to have insight into their depression.

There are a number of problems with such an argument. First and most important is that the argument relies on the patient's 'professionalism'. S/he knows what is involved and plays along so that the doctor can have the data they need. Once again it assumes operating in medical discourses. The crossinstrument correlation often given in evidence would result not so much from the instruments' ability to gauge experience, but, rather, from their roots in the same dominant psychiatric discourse in which the patient is also submerged. Knowing what might be at stake -especially in a psychiatrist's surgery -the patient co-operates more or less willingly, trying to give the 'right' answers. Incidentally, such co-operation in not very diffi cult in the case of the BDI -it is extremely easy to realize after reading the fi rst couple of items that there is a pattern to how the scoring is made and one can give answers without even reading the items [START_REF] Dahlstrom | The Beck Depression Inventory: Item order and the impact of response sets[END_REF].

The model of quantifying the experience of mental illness necessarily results in the dominance of medical discourse. The patient's experience cannot surface as s/he plays the game, getting more 'professional' every time s/he is asked to complete a questionnaire. Regardless of the theoretical standpoint assuming either that experience is primarily discursive or that there is a depression to be discovered behind the words, the situation is hardly acceptable. By having to respond to instrument items, the patient cannot access their depression. As Edgar points out, diagnostic instruments impose themselves and their institutionally sanctioned goals upon the patient, inhibiting, at the same time, the possibility of the patient's refl ecting upon her/his illness and its meaning. The situation of completing a questionnaire is one in which the patient cannot fi nd their voice and offer a story of suffering rather than a measurement of madness [START_REF] Kangas | Making sense of depression: Perceptions of melancholia in lay narratives[END_REF]. Finally, it is one in which the potential diagnosis is institutionalized and becomes non-negotiable and thus adds to the trauma of being a psychiatric patient [START_REF] Sayre | The patient's diagnosis[END_REF]also Phillips, 2003).

The situation is exacerbated by the fact that psychological and iatric testing does not account for the power relations involved in the activity. It is crucial to understand that completing the BDI, and indeed other such instruments, is a socially situated, context-dependent activity, with its particular confi guration of power relations, particularly relevant in the context of a psychiatric examination. Patients are not empowered to challenge the test itself, as the informants in my study were -they are to get on with the task; the co-operation is more than likely to be obtained.

The BDI cannot be seen outside its anchorage in the dominant discourse of psychiatry and clinical psychology. It works within the parameters of such discourse, and so it successfully measures something, because it corresponds with the rules of what constitutes such measurement. And while it might identify the (Major) Depressive Episode (ICD F32-33 or DSM, 296.2-3), it is unlikely to pin down the experience of low mood, sadness, the experience of what we call 'depression'.

The obvious fi nal question to be considered is the value of the BDI (or indeed any other standardized psychiatric instrument's) score. Is it useful? As a linguist, I cannot see the point of it. As I have argued above, completing the questionnaire is part of a set of practices that turn people into patients and professionalize their patienthood. It does not offer a platform upon which a patient's experience can be meaningfully translated offering a clinician a shortcut insight into the patient's illness. In this sense, my point is not about coming up with a yet newer version of the BDI or any other such instrument. The practice of administering scales cannot be seen as having much to do with the experience of mental illness; rather, it is a means of getting the patient to submerge themselves into the dominant psychiatric discourse. The medical evaluation of this point is beyond the scope of an article by a linguist.

I would like to end this article with a plea for more concerted research leading to development of methods of assessment which would allow insight into experience of distress, ones which are framed by this experience and not put a frame on it which is only relevant to the researcher/clinician. It is important for such research to cross the boundaries of disciplines traditionally dealing with mental illness and its assessment. I hope to have shown here that discourse analysis can play a role of a critical but useful friend providing a fresh outlook on assessing psychological distress.

  , old, 'uneducated', town I worry whether I look old and unattractive. I have not got the means to take care of my looks 'cause everything costs money.

  , young, educated, city I don't think I fail more than, but this is a little strange question, because it should refer to a situation, I think, right? I don't know, a specifi c situation. And not just yesterday but a longer period … Extract 9 JG, 70 years old, male, educated, large city … the second question, I don't care what it means, here is an interesting question. Is it my future? Or the future of the family, people or what? I do worry about the future of the children, family. As regards myself, for me, I don't care about the future.

  2Perhaps answer two, I have lost most interest in other people, now everything focuses round home, my nephew. He interests me the most, because he is tiny, lovely.

	Extract 1
	AB, female, young, 'uneducated', town
	(on item 12, Social Withdrawal)

health: 12(4) Notes 1. The research adhered to the ethical guidelines for research issued by the Polish Psychological Association (PTP). It was approved and monitored in the Wroclaw Faculty of the Warsaw School of Social Psychology. 2. For space and practical reasons, I have decided to show only the translations of the Polish original discourses. The originals can be obtained from me by request. All translations of the data are mine. Sometimes, the extracts may seem somewhat disjointed and presented in 'poor' English. This is because I have attempted to render the originals as closely as possible. 3. This item was dropped from the BDI-II. I have decided to include the data resulting from the interaction with it, for my aim here is to show how people interact with a questionnaire. Moreover, my critique posits that quantitative instruments do not and cannot offer a meaningful insight into such complex and ideologically underpinned experiences such as that of mental illness. Amending the instrument (for example, by dropping an item) is not at issue.

Author biography


Magdalena Zolkos

come

particularly the more precarious lower-middle class and its fear of downward mobility. As a drive to overcome precariousness or marginality, cursilería is a form of 'disempowered desire '. Valis explains that in the second half of the 19th century this anxiety progessively 'trickles upward' to the upper-middle classes, as cursilería intersects with a national sense of marginality, exacerbated by the 1898 colonial debacle. Spain in the 19th century is characterized by 'a perception of being modern despite insufficient modernization' (p. 11), and the pretentiousness of lo cursi stems more precisely from the desire to be modern without having the material or cultural means to be so. The dilemma of Spanish national distinctiveness is central to an understanding of the obsession with cursi-ness. If to be modern is to be inauthentic, and to be authentic is to be backward, then cursi-ness as the result of an inept attempt to be modern can be criticized from both a traditionalist and modernizing standpoint, because it attempts to be modern, or because the attempt betrays the persistence of outmoded tradition.

The Culture of Cursilería examines the historically morphing patterns of emotional investment in the perception of cursi-ness in persons, behaviours, objects, and texts, by concentrating on the ways in which cursi-ness is represented in a wide range of texts, from canonical realist novels to magazine chronicles of high society. Because these patterns are continuously morphing, and because cursi-ness in itself implies a temporal or spatial overlap, the coexistence of past and present, or centre and periphery, it is always a semantically overdetermined notion. This is why lo cursi may be aesthetically offensive but is symbolically, as Valis puts it, 'a veritable treasure trove' (p. 87).

After further elaboration on the semantic wealth of cursi, using as springboards the various hypotheses on the ethymology of the word and its early appearances in print beginning in the 1840s, in Chapters 2 and 3 Valis concentrates on cursilería as a window to the shaping of middle-class identity, seen through a wide variety of objects and social practices: fans, albums, handwriting, dressing, literary salons and public outings, to name but a few. Romanticism, both modern but also dated by the 1860s, is seen as a trope of cursi-ness, through the practices of salon poets and the phenomenon of the middle-class craze for the poet Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer. Here and elsewhere, Susan Stewart's On Longing (1984) provides some important hermeneutical insights: the function of supplementarity of belongings for the bourgeois subject, the miniature as a for bourgeois interiority, the souvenir and the collection devices for the objectification of desire.

The next two chapters examine the convergence of identity formation and structuration of national feeling in the Restauración era, as middleclass anxieties of inadequateness are replicated at a wider level as feelings of national inadequateness. Valis offers a detailed analysis of the represen-269 tation of cursilería in, among several other texts, two novels by novelist Benito Pérez Galdós, La de Bringas and Cánovas, the very last of the Episodios Nacionales. I found particularly illuminating the way in which Valis goes beyond Galdós' apparent critique of cursi society to highlight the striking parallels between the structure of feeling generating cursilería and the very narrative structure and figural qualities of Galdós' novels, thus adding complexity to their status as social critique and historical (and historiographical) commentary and, at the same time, pointing to the expansion of cursi-ness as a cultural signifier and a structuring feeling.

Galdos' Cánovas is pervaded by a sense of nostalgia, of feeling out of place in a fast-changing society now ripe with class tensions, political confrontation and regional demands. In Chapters 6 to 8 Valis examines several modernist nostalgia-filled texts by, among others, Benavente, Gómez de la Serna, Valle Inclán and García Lorca, written between the disaster of 1898 and the Civil War. They are viewed as expressions of mourning in reaction to an accelerated modernization perceived as 'a profound decentering of life'. Here, cursi-ness works as a bipolar critical concept, both as a negative trope of obsolescence and as a metaphor for all that has been marginalized by a modernization that then becomes the object of critique through ironic negation.

The final chapter jumps ahead to the postmodern movida experience in post-Franco Spain and its addiction to kitsch, viewed as debased utopia which both makes manifest the crisis of utopian master narratives (which it parodically subverts) and serves as a vehicle for their continuity in a displaced, metaphorized form. In this sense the movida 'functions as both sign and countersign of the culture producing it' (p. 283), in a way that seems to parallel the rehabilitation of cursi-ness through nostalgia elucidated in the preceding chapters.

Because of the semantic expansiveness cursilería, its affective transformations prove to be an ideal focus point for the more wide-ranging undertaking that Valis wants to promote: a sustained study of the kaleidoscopic reconfigurations of the structures of feeling of Spanish society through the process of modernization during the last two centuries. Such a study must attempt to understand, as Valis endeavours to do in this dense and rewarding book, 'not only what structures feeling but what feelings structure' (p. 38). The Culture of Cursilería will be hailed within the budding field of Spanish cultural studies as a pioneering exploration of the relations between feelings and sociohistorical transformations.

  José A. Valero University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire


Michele Paule

come   L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire

which try to come to terms with the phenomenon. All these works suggest that cult media are different from mainstream media because of the way in which they are received (with The Rocky Horror Picture Show a key exemplar), and/or because they are, 'kind of offbeat, kind of weird, kind of strange' (Everman, 1993: 1).

This double emphasis on reception and textuality has characterized the study of cult media ever since (and especially since the 1990s) the decade from which anything qualified as cult. Henry Jenkins' (1992) work on fandom brought cult celebration into popular mass culture, whereas Jeffrey [START_REF] Sconce | Trashing the Academy: Taste, Excess and an Emerging Politics of Cinematic Style[END_REF] study of exploitation aesthetics drove it back into the realm of subculture, albeit equipped with more aesthetic pretence then ever before (everyone was now a potential fan, and every bad film was someone's masterpiece). One of the starting points of the current interest in the study of cult has been the 'Defining Cult Movies' conference at the University of Nottingham, in 2000. Something of a legendary cult event itself by now, the conference made a serious attempt to discuss what 'cult' is, and how its study fitted or extended existing research and teaching briefs in academia (Jancovich et al., 2003). Since then, several publications have tried to tackle the subject from a variety of angles. Unruly Pleasures (Mendik and Harper, 2000) offered a series of (largely) textual analyses on cult films, singling out critical attitudes as fan approaches (and vice versa). Mark [START_REF] Jancovich | Cult Fictions: Cult Movies, Subcultural Capital and the Production of Cultural Distinctions[END_REF] has argued the importance of a culturalist view of reception in creating cults, and Matt [START_REF] Hills | Fan Cultures[END_REF] has singled out the particular implications of implied and anticipative fandom in his study of fan cultures. The online journal Intensities (www.cult-media.com) and the Alterimage book series (coordinated by the Cult Film Archive, see: www.wallflowerpress.co.uk), testify of approaches ranging from formalism to sociology, firmly entrenching the topic within critical debates on contemporary media. The eyebrow-raising debate on the cultural status of Showgirls shows to what extent a universally vilified film (one fast becoming an exemplar) invites aesthetic, sociological, ethical, feminist and historical frameworks into the study of cult (see [START_REF] Hunter | Beaver Las Vegas: a Fan Boy's Defence of Showgirls[END_REF][START_REF] Mizuta | Round Table: Showgirls[END_REF]. A book on cult television, then, seems very timely.

Overall, Cult Television presents a fine range of welcome additions to the study of cult. Its selection of essays and topics is well informed, and it demonstrates that the editors know what subjects are likely to demand more attention than others. It seems only logical that there are essays devoted to The X-Files, Star Trek, Doctor Who and Buffy the Slayer, the quartet most likely to make up the canon of cult television. There does seem to be a high proportion of attention devoted to live-action science-fiction television, begging the question: why? Given the difficulty of finding a shared, common body of works that make up cult television, there must be exclusions. I have no quarrel with them, even that of The Simpsons. Apparently, the editors have decided against a multitude of texts

          
being discussed, opting instead for a small range of essays (12 in all) with a clear focus on texts that are non-disputed parts of the cult television canon. But an acknowledgement of the canonical and generic limitations would have made the selection much easier to accept.

Theoretically, Cult Television appears to be too prudent. In the introduction we find the obligatory reference to the double emphasis typical for studying cult when the editors state that cult applies to 'any television program that is considered offbeat or edgy, [or] that draws a niche audience' (p. ix). There is a threefold theoretical structure to the book: first, on theories of cult; second, harbouring a range of textual analyses; and third, singling out (approaches to) reception. Again, this is a logic distinction to make. But while most of the essays are confident in their discussion of the texts, they seem reluctant to push the envelope when it comes to theorizing and determining the concept of cult in itself. The two most useful essays in this respect are the first two. Both Philippe Le Guern, and Mark Jancovich and Nathan Hunt, advocate a Bourdieuan perspective by linking the status of texts to attitudes towards 'cult quality', exclusivity, competence and superiority with fans. Both essays carve out a similar approach towards cult television that typifies cult cinema or art worlds. But they do not explore how the ways in which cult television is different from cinema and art defines it as a topic of its own. Hence, what this book lacks is an attempt, by the editors, towards such a definition. They do not go further than observing some obvious differences between television and cinema (seriality, elasticity, longevity). This is a pity. Too many writers on cult have refrained from trying to define cult media. While one needs to appreciate the carefulness that withholds scholars from ramming home any definition, this should not lead to a refusal. One cannot go on studying a for more than a decade without offering at least a shot. Capturing the topic, isolating the species through definition, now seems urgent.

Cult Television is at its strongest when fans and texts are discussed. Sara Gwenllian-Jones' essay on the fictional worlds of cult television shows the intrinsic relationship between the representations of story worlds and their active reception by avid viewers, who not only fill in the gaps of these worlds, but offer virtual realities far beyond the text itself. Her four possible formats of in-text world exploration (travelogue, nodal, combination, portal) could well become templates for the study of narrative worlds altogether. Similarly, the essays by Jeffrey Sconce, Eva Vieth, and Mary Hammond provide important insights into topics. The most polemic essay is probably Toby account of 'levels of rightness' used in fan interpretations of The Avengers. Echoing Jancovich's critique of the eagerness to assign value-judgements (so typical of fans), its warning against the short-sightedness of evaluative and exclusive tendencies is a sound one. But it also needs more than the sudden invocation of big business' exploitation of fans, or the blunt distinction between 389 'progressive' and 'regressive' potentials of cultism, to drive home any argument on the perceived hostility of cult fans to those who are considered lesser fans. The fierceness with which this 'inward looking trainspotter's' attitude (pp. 193-4) is acted out, suggests a far more complex range of strategies and motivations than Miller acknowledges. It is not because devout cult fans do not care for non-cult fans that their use of evaluation is less complex than anyone else's.

One small, annoying shortcoming of this book is its presentation. Like some cult media themselves, it is a decidedly 'open text' lacking a set of firm boundaries. But by not offering an index or a bibliography on the topic, Cult Television limits its usability as a work of research. In the end, Cult Television is a fun read for everyone interested in fiction television. Theoretically it is an addition to the status quo of the field rather than a radical intervention in it. It never tries (nor claims) to be more than a collection of essays on a shared topic. This is also its quality. It is careful, useful and thorough in its pursuit of the study of particular cult television texts.

Ernest Mathijs University of Wales, Aberystwyth

Will Wright, The Wild West: The Mythical Cowboy and Social Theory.

London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi: Sage, 2001. vi + 205 pp. (inc. index). ISBN 0-7619-5232-2 (hbk); ISBN 0-7619-5233-0 (pbk) £14.99

The Wild West appears to be another book reading the cowboy in terms of his mythic relevance to American self-understanding. However, Wright reverses the expected focus and concentrates on various understandings of the social contract using the cowboy and westerns to dramatize the relation of the individual to society in American life and institutions.

From Hobbes and Adam Smith, through Marx, Weber and Durkheim, Wright takes us on an entertaining canter through different versions of theory relating to American market society, illustrating them through what he terms America's 'social myth of origin' (p. 1). In the last third of the book, he considers, in more of a gallop, the familiar intersections of myth and power by way of chapters on women, Native Americans and the environment. As a work of cultural studies, The Wild West is an intriguing introduction to the central thinkers and issues that underlie our understanding of the emergence and maintenance of civil society. The existence of an open frontier was fulcral to American thinkers like Thomas Jefferson, as we might expect, but also to European thinkers such as Locke, for whom the availability of the wilderness (to white males) was necessary to his concepts of man (sic) and nature. Wright takes the reader patiently through various ways of thinking the individual and the market, sometimes too patiently and repetitively for the advanced reader, but the expository clarity means that this could serve as an excellent coursebook in social theory. Moreover, it is differentiated from more conventional treatments of these areas by the way he inflects the topics constantly with examples drawn from the myth of the frontier and the cowboy. This use of the cowboy is much more than simply illustrative or supposedly student-friendly (indeed, film studies tells us of the unpopularity of the western among students nowadays), for Wright serious point to 391


David Callahan

           the nature of individualism in relation to the market, they dramatize problems that the theory either ignores or leaves implicit. Moreover, their generic and moral features also inform other popular culture texts, so that both for students of social theory, as for students of popular culture, The Wild West offers an invigorating demonstration of the intersection of political science with cultural studies in ways that confirm the cowboy as, indeed, a core cultural icon.

these texts, so inspiring to many of us in their time (or soon after; I am a '1970s person', but I grew up reading these texts). In addition to the books already mentioned, DeKoven discusses Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, The Port Huron Statement of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, the Living Theatre's Paradise Now!, William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time as well as the work of Toni Morrison, E.L. Doctorow and others. While DeKoven's methodology is rooted in literary studies, the range of texts and references -from philosophy to politics to literature -defines the 1960s broadly and convincingly makes relevant the concerns of the 1960s to understanding our present. If this move itself seems anachronistic, just consider the central role that the 1960s has played in the recent presidential election season in the United States, which has been framed as a referendum on the Vietnam era.

The strength of DeKoven's book, its many adept close readings and its careful sorting out of modern and postmodern impulses within such readings, also points to its weakness. While it engages with the work of Raymond Williams, Fredric Jameson, Andreas Huyssen and others, the book does not contribute substantially to the theorization of the postmodern itself. DeKoven accepts conventional definitions of both modernism and postmodernism to enable her textual analysis. Similarly, the focus on modernism and postmodernism as 'structures of feeling' creates ambivalence in her book. She seems to try hard to convince us (and herself ?) that modernist utopian desires persist in postmodernism and that this is an immensely hopeful fact. But her analysis cuts both ways. If 1960s utopian thinking spawned postmodernism through its radical relocation of subjectivity (summed up in the feminist insistence that 'the personal is political'), then 1960s radicalism was always doomed to failure despite the feeling of possibility that it imparted to its participants. DeKoven admits a 'bone-deep sense of loss' over the squandered promise of the 1960s and despite her claim that utopian desires persist in postmodernism, she provides little to impart hope to her reader. (I, for one, cannot accept that the film Thelma and Louise is an affirmation of freedom!) DeKoven's struggle to find hope in the present is honest and heartfelt and it underscores the premise of her book, which finds the roots of the present in that era that resembles it the least.

Elizabeth Walden Bryant University