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

一个学术共识正在形成，即精神疾病严重抑郁症代表了一个日益增长的全球和经济重要性的问题。 尽管有大量的流行病学和临床证据支持这一观点，但很少有研究评估抑郁症全球出现的地方社会和文化根源。这在西方工业化以外的社会尤其如此，在这些社会中，抑郁症以前既不是突出的社会文化也不是专业诊断类别。 在中华人民共和国，在1978年"开放和改革"时期开始之前，抑郁症的患病率比美国低几百倍，而抑郁症作为一个文化范畴在日常中国人中几乎没有价值。 然而，在过去的二十年中，抑郁症的诊断急剧上升，因为抑郁症继续在大众媒体，公共政策圈和当地日常话语中获得越来越多的关注。 这篇论文的研究项目由文化人类学家将探讨抑郁症在中国正在从一个模糊的专业类别转化为中国社会和精神病学实践中的一个突出的地方的文化过程。 该项目将研究抑郁症在四个领域的传播：医学教育和临床治疗，中国家庭，主观疾病叙述和当代健康实践，以确定有助于在中国背景下将抑郁症作为一种疾病类别进行挪用和传播的当地文化逻辑。 这四个领域将通过参与者观察;与医生，患者，家庭成员，教育工作者和政府官员的非正式和正式访谈;疾病叙述的记录;档案研究;和文本分析。 这项研究将有助于当代人类学理论的争论，涉及范畴生产，体现，精神病学和医学的文化维度。 民族志数据和疾病叙述的丰富组合也将引起中国学者的兴趣，通过提供对当代中国社会社会变革的当地动态的急需的洞察力，并有助于澄清中国最近的大规模社会和经济转型及其对个人和家庭当地生活的影响之间的联系。 这项研究的更广泛的影响包括更好地了解全球化对心理健康的广泛影响，并为寻求制定文化敏感的心理健康政策的管理者和政策制定者提供丰富的数据库。

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.