Young women's experiences and understandings of living with anxiety through a feminist social constructionist lens

Background: Young women are consistently overrepresented in prevalence rates for anxiety, yet mainstream approaches to anxiety are age and gender neutral. The lived experiences of young women are missing from dominant discourses which construct anxiety as a mental illness and divert attention away from ideals of young femininity that shape expectations and experiences in emerging adulthood. From a feminist social constructionist approach, my doctoral research explored young women’s own understandings and experiences of responding to anxiety in their everyday lives.

Methodology: Within a feminist qualitative methodology, twelve young women with anxiety kept reflective diaries with opportunities for creativity over four weeks, followed by online semi-structured interviews. Reflexive thematic analysis included participant reflections on initial findings to strengthen the trustworthiness of my research.

Findings: My research captured nuanced and expansive understandings of anxiety, including embodied and relational understandings and the ways in which participants navigated gendered expectations in the transition to adulthood. Whilst anxiety was often presented as an individual experience, it was also located within the wider, disempowering social context. Participant narratives captured the way they blended professional, experiential, and community strategies to develop a personalised approach for responding to anxiety that resonated with aspects of social and experiential approaches to mental health. Relational support across these strategies was important in a journey towards self-compassion, acceptance, and empowerment. However, current opportunities for collective understandings and collective empowerment were limited.

Conclusions: My research highlighted the value of taking a critical feminist approach that engaged with both lived experiences and their social construction. Based on the findings, I put forward an argument for feminist relational approaches that hold the potential to address some of the contentions raised by promoting collective understandings and collective empowerment for politicising young women’s anxiety.