Depression

Abstract

Depression, which psychiatrists regard as a most common mental illness, has been examined by anthropologists especially closely since the 1980s. While most medical experts consider depression as a universal, neurobiological disease that requires a global public health intervention, anthropologists instead ask why the illness known in psychiatry as ‘depression’ appears to have been extremely rare in much of the world until very recently. They also investigate how a supposedly neurobiological disorder could possibly arise with increasing frequency in so many places in such a short time. Some anthropologists suggest that the apparent rise of depression is co-constituted by changes in diagnostic criteria, a medicalisation of normal distress, as well as the growing influence of the global pharmaceutical industry. They have questioned the assumption of a clear-cut border between normalcy and abnormalcy, illuminated depression’s social origins, and problematised the extension of medical power into spheres of life that used to lie beyond the reach of medicine. This entry shows how anthropologists investigated depression before and after its alleged global rise in the 1990s, and how this phenomenon can be understood as a cultural, historical product profoundly influenced by socioeconomic transformations of the current time.