Cultural Aspects of Depressive Experience and Disorders

Within the last decade, depressive experience and disorder has emerged as one of the world's major health and social problems (e. and racism and sexism) factors associated with the etiology, exacerbation, and maintenance of depressive experience and disorder. As a result of the increased worldwide risk and burden of depressive experience and disorders (Murray & Lopez, 1996), it is essential researchers and professionals improve their understanding of the complex cultural knowledge, issues, and concerns related to this problem. Cultural variations in the nature and meaning of depressive experience and disorder have critical implications for assessment, diagnosis/classification, and treatment because cultural variations imply cultural relativism regarding with regard to such critical variables as epistemology, personhood, self, body, health and disorder, normality, and the spectrum of social and interactive behaviors (e. the extent cultures differ in their constructions of reality, their meaning systems, and their socialization patterns, differences will emerge in psychopathology, including depressive experience and disorder. A major problem facing clinicians and researchers is the semantic confusion surrounding the term "depression." "Depression" denotes a mood, a symptom, and various syndromes of disorder and disease, and simultaneously connotes a broad spectrum of affective experiences and social consequences. In many instances, the three terms-mood, symptom, and syndrome-are discussed apart from the many different life contexts in which they are shaped, experienced, communicated, and responded to by others. That is to say, they are decontextualized. This is a serious problem because decontextualization permits the researcher/clinician to assign their ethnocentric meanings and interpretations to the problems independent of the context in which they emerge and are sustained. There may be little consideration for situation stressors as well as normative personality configurations that may differ from those of the researcher/clinician. Depressive experience and disorder have long been a source of concern in Western cultural traditions. "Depression," according to Jackson (1986), is derived from the Latin word "deprimere" meaning "to press down." With the passage of time, "depression" gained increasing currency in English, French, and German medical treatises. Initially, it was used 3 Marsella: Cultural Aspects of Depressive Experience and Disorders Produced by The Berkeley Electronic Press, 2011 as a subset of "melancholy," then as a synonym, and later as a replacement for the term. Hippocrates (330-399 BCE) included melancholia within his tripartite classification of disorders (i.e., mania, melancholia, phrenitis). He considered its cause to be a function of excessive black bile. Stanley Jackson (1986), in his …