One cannot fully assess the nature of depression without addressing the context (cultural, communal, familial) within which it occurs, any more than one could fully understand the growth of a bacterium without understanding the medium within which it grows. To focus the analogy even further, we might say that we cannot fully understand the growth of the phenomenon of depression, the rising incidence and prevalence, without understanding the medium within which this phenomenon is growing.
That medium is the western culture, the community one lives in, the schools and groups one belongs to, and the family. Much has been written about the influence of marital status, marital satisfaction, early parental loss, and early developmental trauma on the vulnerability to depression. However, much less information has found its way into the mainstream psychosocial literature in regards to the influences of both the community and the larger western culture on the growing incidence of depression.
What is this culture of depression?
Families, communities, and farms have been broken apart as a result of the industrial revolution, economic swings, technology, and the pursuit of work. Two income families have become much more prevalent as personal income in the US became flat in 1973, and then has been declining since 1980. With both parents working, and grandparents in another city, most children are spending their critical attachment years in pre-school or a series of day care centers.
Western culture, according to Richard Tarnas, author of: The Passion of the Western Mind & Cosmos and Psyche, has evolved over the last few millennia in such a manner that modern humankind is now alienated, disoriented, and unconscious. Despite the very significant advances afforded by the current world view, we are seeing the darker aspects of that world view come to the fore in the form of world wars, holocausts, the threat of nuclear annihilation, and now global warming and ecologic disequilibrium.
Furthermore, the western world-view is that we live in an inanimate universe, with other life forms, which are essentially unconscious. We consider ourselves to be unique in the universe, and as a corollary to that, we are superior, and we are, by definition, alone.
Additionally, we believe that science is the only valid way of knowing. In a neuroanatomical sense, we have over-privileged the functions of the prefrontal cortex and left hemisphere, over the rest of our brain. Logic rules, and instinct and tradition have become stepchildren.
More and more, if we think about it, we grapple with what seems to be an inescapable conclusion: we live in an essentially meaningless, purely physical, random world, in which we are essentially alone, separate from others, separate from nature, and separate from (if we even believe in) a creator. We wonder if we may be nothing more than meaning-seeking specks of dust in an infinite, uncaring, and unconscious universe. We are here. The creator, if there is one, is out/up there.
This then, is the world-view and the culture, within which depression (not to mention greed and corruption) has grown in incidence and prevalence. If world-views create worlds, as the leading psychotherapy of depression, cognitive therapy, asserts, then we must wonder what it is about the assumptions of the western world view that have created a new reality in which depression is rapidly becoming the second leading cause of disability in the world. Could the assumptions (outlined above) be mistaken, or harmful?
Adapted from Depression: Advancing the Treatment Paradigm.
