‘Co-morbidities’, Femininities, and Non-normativities

This chapter opens by exploring participants’ experiences of both seeking and not seeking help for their mental distress. In many cases, their mental distress was not restricted to social anxiety, but bled into other forms—‘co-morbidities’, in psychiatric terms—such as eating problems and sadness. Placing this aspect of interviewees’ narratives into dialogue with the DSM-5’s account of the interplay between SAD and other diagnoses has two effects. Firstly, it highlights the poor demarcation between diagnostic categories, thereby problematising the purported objective nature of them as disease entities. Secondly, it raises the possibility that non-normativity—routes to which include neurodiversity, personality style, and physical health conditions—gives rise to experiencing social anxiety. As such, ‘co-morbidities’ form a backdrop not only to this entire chapter, but to the entire book. Discussing the role of physical health conditions then provides a springboard from which to dive into the chapter’s final portion, wherein I home in on physicality. That is, examining participants’ encounters with microaggressions and their effects on the body offers a means by which we can explore how mental distress is experienced by the woman in her entirety. In turn, through utilising feminist scholarship on embodiment, a holistic understanding of women’s social anxiety is presented.