Depression: Ethno Psychological Themes

Simon Dein

DOI: https://doi.org/10.17140/antpoj-1-102 · Published 2016-01-25 · Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 · © 2016 The Author(s)

Also available as PDF (figures and tables appear in the PDF).

Conclusion

In the above sections, I have discussed how various ethno psychological factors impact upon the experience and presentation of emotional distress. I would argue that while dysphoric mood appears to be a fairly universal response to loss and adversity, DSM depression is only one variant of this and is dependent on a culturally specific conceptualisation of self, autonomy and mind body dualism. We would concur with Marsella47: “That cultural factors constitute an important context for all aspects of depressive experience and disorder and must be considered if an accurate understanding of depression is to be achieved”. Despite this, the literature pertaining to culture and depression is still dominated by studies based upon ‘Western’based diagnostic criteria and examine the incidence and prevalence rates and/or levels of depressive symptoms in different countries.

We need to differentiate the role of culture and language in the experience and expression of emotion. Language is a central medium for the communication of emotional and physical well-being alongside emotional and physical distress. Research in Anthropology and Linguistics has highlighted cultural differences in the relative focus on the body in emotion discourse. There is some interesting anthropological work suggesting relationships between language, embodiment, metaphor and the expression of emotional distress, particularly somatization.

Future work in this area requires detailed ethnographic research on mood, and its emic conceptualizations in diverse cultures examining the complex interplay of culture, language, mind and brain. Research should focus upon the relationship of depression to local contexts with ethnographic research describing patterns of shared cultural meaning, experience and behaviour, through the deployment of in-depth interviews and participant observation among patients. Through this, we can elicit the analytic categories through which individuals perceive suffering.

Misra51 states:

“The current Western thinking of the science of psychology in it prototypical form, despite being local and indigenous, assumes a global relevance and is treated as a universal mode of generating knowledge. Its dominant voice subscribes to a decontextualized vision with an extraordinary emphasis on individualism, mechanism, and objectivity. This peculiarly Western mode of thinking is fabricated, projected, and institutionalized through representation technologies and scientific rituals and transported on a large scale to the non-Western societies under political-economic domination. As a result, Western psychology tends to maintain an independent stance at cost of ignoring other substantive possibilities from disparate cultural traditions. Mapping reality through Western constructs has offered a pseudo understanding of the people of alien cultures and has had debilitating effects in terms of misconstruing the special realities of other people and exoticizing or disregarding psychologies that are non-Western. Consequently, when people from other cultures are exposed to Western psychology, they find their identities placed in question and their conceptual repertoires rendered obsolete”.

Ethno psychological themes include indigenous concepts of the self and autonomy, the categorisation of emotions, the predominance of particular emotions in a given society, interrelations of particular emotions, the identification on specific situations in which particular emotions arise, and the bodily experience of particular emotions. Understanding depression across cultures necessitates knowledge of indigenous conceptualisations of dysphoric affect i.e. an ethno psychology of depressive affect.

2. According to Lindholm20 anthropologists have been reluctant to engage with the study of emotion, heeding to Durkheim’s and Mauss52 warning that emotions cannot be properly studied on account of the fact that they fluid, mixed, not easily defined and impossible to analyze. Furthermore, emotion has been viewed in

North America and Western Europe as a natural force, arising in the core of the individual and falling therefore within the disciplinary realm of psychology and physiology, rather than within the domain of anthropology with its focus upon shared culture and symbols. In their quest to gain professional legitimacy they have favoured a masculine meaning centred and cerebral model of research rather than any serious study of Traditional emotions have been seen as irrational, with women being driven by them. This assertion has little in the way of empirical proof. However anthropologists have long relied upon emotional relationships in their fieldwork deploying empathy, trust and rapport to gain their informants’ trust.

It is now over 140 years since Darwin wrote the Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. He argued there that emotional expressions were biologically innate, were evolutionary adaptive, were important in communication and that humans expressed emotions in their faces in exactly the same way across the world regardless of their or culture. Despite increasing anthropological evidence that culture has a significant influence on emotion, there is physiological and evolutionary evidence that emotions are not infinitely malleable, nor totally cognitive, nor completely relational. I would agree with Schweder,54 an advocate of the interpretive relativist view of culture, who asserts: ‘it is ludicrous to imagine that the emotional functioning of people in different cultures is basically the same. It is just as ludicrous to imagine that each culture’s emotional life is unique’.

While much of the anthropological work on emotion 19,21-23,50,54-56 was conducted some time ago, recently there has been resurgent interest in this area, although as Beatty57 notes, there has been a ‘shift of emphasis in psychological anthropology away from emotion in favor of “subjectivity,” “embodiment,” “personhood,” and “experience”. This has fruitfully complicated the issues, making emotion one of a set of interrelated problemaspects rather than a distinct topic or explicit focus of inter- 58-60 61 est’. Unlike previous work on emotion e.g. Lutz and White this recent interest takes account of dissolution of the subject and the critique of the notion of ‘culture’ resulting from globalization, social mobility and postmodernism. Anthropological accounts are now seen as situated, limited and partial.

As Geertz62 notes, it is not just ideas but emotions as well which should be seen as cultural artefacts. Emotions may be conceptualised in very different ways in different cultures. 63(p 212) For example Lutz argues that many Western views of emotion maintain that emotions are ‘singular events situated within individuals’. In contrast, using fieldwork data from the Ifaluk of the Caroline Islands of Micronesia, Ifaluk views of emotion emphasise ‘exchanges between individuals’. Other ethno psychological studies suggest that small scale sociocentric cultures experience emotion not as private and inner motivation but rather as a consequence of the enactment of specific public roles, and emphasise formal obligations and social relationship.20

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