Seeing Depression Through A Cultural Lens

Abstract Seeing Depression through a Cultural Lens, the collaborative work of a clinical neuroscientist and a scholar of comparative culture, examines the effects of cultural identity on the epidemiology, phenomenology, and narratives of depression, the bipolar spectrum, and suicide. Culture is associated with emotional communication style, “idioms of distress,” the conception of depression and of bipolar disorders, and how people with mood disorders might be stigmatized. It is linked to structural factors—environmental, social, and economic circumstances—that create or mitigate the risk of depression, sometimes precipitate episodes of illness, and facilitate or impede treatment. Culture shapes depressed people’s willingness to disclose or acknowledge their condition and to seek care, their relationships with clinicians, and their acceptance or rejection of specific treatments. Cultural context is essential to understanding suicide. It underlies people’s motives for suicide, facilitating and inhibiting factors, the social acceptability of death by suicide, and the availability of lethal means of self-harm. Cultural identity is always intersectional—comprising elements related to race and ethnicity; gender; age, generation, and life stage; education; social class; occupation; migrant or minority status; region of residence; and religious belief and practice. Seeing Depression through a Cultural Lens explores the implications of each of these dimensions using salient concepts form the social sciences; memorable narratives from literature, film, and the clinic; and quantitative findings from epidemiology and psychometrics. It offers readers a framework for culturally aware assessment and management of depression, bipolarity, and suicidal risk in individuals and in populations.