Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dlnhk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T06:42:01.167Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Defeat Depression Campaign

Attitudes towards depression: some medical anthropological queries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Sushrut Jadhav
Affiliation:
Centre for Medical Anthropology, University College London, WC1E 6BT
Roland Littlewood
Affiliation:
Departments of Psychiatry and Anthropology, University College London, WC1E 6BT
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

The vigorous public profile adopted by the College in the ‘Defeat Depression’ campaign (Psychiatric Bulletin, 1993, 17, 573–574) is to be welcomed, but the proposed educational programme is premature. The MORI poll is not an adequate basis for understanding how ‘depression’ is popularly conceived nor how people respond to it. The research report (Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1992) says little about the methods used in the qualitative part of the study: whether the researchers were properly trained in ethnographic field interviewing to elicit illness categorisations, and their ability to elicit the whole complex of ideas and actions, involving nomenclature, causation, agency, recognition and recourse to treatment.

Type
Briefings
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1994

References

Holy, L. & Stuchlik, M. (1980) The Structure of Folk Models, London: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Jadhav, S.S. (1992) Adapting the EMIC to study depressed British subjects. Abstracts, XII World Congress of Social Psychiatry, New Delhi.Google Scholar
Kleinman, A. (1987) Anthropology and psychiatry: The role of culture in cross-cultural research on illness. British Journal of Psychiatry, 151, 447454.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kleinman, A. & Good, B., (eds) (1985) Culture and Depression: Studies in the Anthropology and Cross-Cultural Psychiatry of Affect and Disorder. Berkeley: California University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Littlewood, R. (1990) From categories to contexts: a decade of the ‘new cross-cultural psychiatry’. British Journal of Psychiatry, 156, 308327.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Royal College of Psychiatrists (1992) Research study conducted for the ‘Defeat of Depression’ campaign. ms: Royal College of Psychiatrists.Google Scholar
Weiss, M., Doongaji, D. et al (1992) The explanatory model interview catalogue (EMIC): a contribution to cross-cultural research methods from a study of leprosy and mental health. British Journal of Psychiatry, 160, 819830.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
White, G.M. (1982) The ethnographic study of cultural knowledge of ‘mental disorder’. In Cultural Conceptions of Mental Health and Therapy (eds. White, G.M. and Marsella, A.J.) Dordrecht: Reidel.Google Scholar
Submit a response

eLetters

No eLetters have been published for this article.