Domestic Moods: Maternal Mental Health in Northern Vietnam.

In this article I propose the notion of domestic mood as an important concept for mental health research. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted among women living in Hanoi, Vietnam, I explore the maternal mental health problems that the women reported, focusing particularly on the household tensions and conflicts that made the entry into motherhood a distressful experience. To develop the concept of domestic mood, I draw on Martin Heidegger's work, particularly his claim that human being is always a being-with. Comprehending maternal mental health problems, I argue, requires that we pay attention not only to individual states of mind, but also to the ways that domestic environments shape people's moods. Taking this analytical approach, I show how the mental health states of pregnant women and new mothers in Vietnam were inseparable from their husbands' structural vulnerabilities within kin groups.