Mental health of women is often looked at from a biomedical lens. Mental health issues resulting out of globalising economic and cultural forces are generally neglected. This often implies that social problems are understood as individual problems. Increasingly discourses in sociology and anthropology explore mental health in bio-cultural terms where social structural arrangements are said to contribute majorly to the phenomenon of psychosocial distress. There is a need to explore the ways in which the social and economic conditions which structure women’s existence as part of poor urban households require attention. This article moves away from the mental illness paradigm through which distress of women is usually understood. With the help of narratives, it seeks to explore the distress of women in the context of the community they live in and the gender roles they negotiate.
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