Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Social Construction of Depression in Chinese Societies

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A scholarly consensus is now emerging that the psychiatric disorder major depression represents an issue of growing global and economic importance. Despite a wealth of epidemiological and clinical evidence to support this view, little research has assessed the local social and cultural origins of depression's global emergence. This is particularly true in societies outside the industrialized West in which depression previously served as neither a salient sociocultural nor professional diagnostic category. In the People's Republic of China, prior to the commencement of the "open up and reform" period in 1978, prevalence rates for depression were several hundred times lower than in the United States, while depression as a cultural category had little value among everyday Chinese. Over the course of the past twenty years, however, diagnoses of depression have risen dramatically, as depression continues to garner increasing attention among the mass media, public policy circles, and local everyday discourse. This dissertation research project by a cultural anthropologist will investigate the cultural processes by which depression in China is being transformed from an obscure professional category to a prominent place within Chinese society and psychiatric practice. The project will examine the circulation of depression within four domains: medical education and clinical treatment, the Chinese family, subjective illness narratives, and contemporary health practices, to determine the local cultural logics conducive to the appropriation and dissemination of depression as a disease category within the Chinese context. These four domains will be examined through participant observation; informal and formal interviews with doctors, patients, family members, educators, and government officials; recordings of illness narratives; archival research; and textual analysis. This study will contribute to contemporary debates in anthropological theory concerning category production, embodiment, and the cultural dimensions of psychiatry and medicine. The rich combination of ethnographic data and illness narratives will also be of interest to China scholars, by providing much-needed insight into the local dynamics of social change in contemporary Chinese society and helping to clarify the connection between China's recent large-scale social and economic transformations and their impact on the local lives of individuals and families. The broader impacts of this study include gaining a better understanding of the broad mental health effects of globalization worldwide, and providing a rich corpus of data for administrators and policymakers seeking to develop culturally-sensitive mental health policies.