This paper looks at the intersection between motherhood and online illness narratives, examining the ways in which women conceptualise their maternal bodies in the context of postnatal depression. Specifically, we examine how discourses of motherhood in distress are positioned in relation to societal norms and expectations, and the othering of the ‘imbalanced’ maternal body. To do so, we apply corpus assisted discourse analysis to posts made in the Mumsnet Talk forum, which specifically discuss postnatal depression. Our findings highlight the discursive strategies employed to represent embodied experiences of a stigmatised condition in an online forum. We focus particularly on the use of embodied explanatory models for mental ill health in mothers to mitigate the stigma attached to the condition. Our study also shows how the embodied lived experience continually interacts with states of mind when making sense of PND and in doing so, transgresses the boundaries set by the body/mind dualism, which prevails in modern medicine.

本文着眼于孕产与网上疾病叙述之间的交集，研究了妇女在产后抑郁症中如何概念化其孕产妇。具体来说，我们研究了如何将苦难中的母性话语与社会规范和期望以及“失衡的”孕产妇身体联系起来。为此，我们将语料库辅助话语分析应用于Mumsnet Talk论坛中的帖子，该论坛专门讨论产后抑郁症。我们的发现强调了在线论坛上用来代表被污名化情况的具体经历的话语策略。我们尤其专注于使用具体化的解释性模型来解决母亲的精神疾病，以减轻与病情相关的污名。