Although depression is considered to be one of mankind?s oldest known disorders, it continues to remain a source of great confusion and debate to lay people and professionals alike. Cross-cultural studies of depression hold much promise for increasing our knowledge of depression because they offer us an opportunity to validate our notions about the conception, distribution, manifestation, measurement, personality correlates, and sociocultural causes of depressive experience and disorder. Based on an extensive review of the cross-cultural literature on these topics, the following conclusions were reached: (1) Depressive experience and disorder vary considerably as a function of sociocultural factors. (2) The epidemiology of depression is not known because of limitations in research methods, but there is reason to believe that the frequency of depression is higher in Western societies. (3) The experience and manifestation of depression differ as a function of Westernization. Those cultures evidencing subjective epistemological orientations tend to avoid the psychologizing of experience and thus do not manifest psychological and existential symptomatology in depression. (4) Depression assessment methods are highly ethnocentric and need to emphasize greater attention to somatic and interpersonal processes in the diagnosis of depression in non-Western cultural settings. (5) Personality correlates of depression vary across cultures with respect to the presence or absence of guilt, self-concept discrepancy, and body image dissatisfaction. (6) Existing sociocultural theories of depression are lacking in explanatory and predictive power and require more comprehensive views of the mechanisms by which sociocultural factors influence the various parameters of depression.
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UAA/APU Consortium Library, General Collection GN502.H36 vol.6