Conclusion

This chapter sees a reprise of the book’s key arguments. Primarily, SAD in women can be conceptualised as a culture-bound syndrome whose (pharmacological) treatment rests on normative white femininity in twenty-first-century Britain. By extension, its conception as a disease entity, underpinned by biological malfunction and individual pathology, is problematised. Going forward, I propose alternative social or lateral models of care which are service user-centred and service user-led. Consciousness-raising is also likely to be of value, as is, in the spirit of Laing’s work, embracing the metanoiac nature of social anxiety and heeding what it might have to tell us. Pragmatically, our best hope might lie in critical psychiatry, which applies some of this book’s tenets within the constraints of mainstream psychiatry. This entails refuting the ‘brain disease’ model and exploring why the individual has presented with mental distress in the context of their life. I draw the book to a close in delimiting its remit and suggesting avenues for future research. I conclude with some personal reflections, including an appreciation of how we women experience SAD and how I have been changed by conducting this research.