ABSTRACT
This chapter proves that there exists a direct link between women’s exilic condition and melancholic postures, and that the consequences of this connection are identifiable both in clinical and a-clinical scenarios. It addresses the questions: Does depression change across space and time, and where lies the boundary between nostalgia and illness, elegy and diagnosis, the individual and the nation, in an interdisciplinary fashion. The chapter validates Kortmann’s claim in the light of depression’s poetic and clinical discourse. In psychiatric contexts, the transnational–depressive dyad is a crucial one to consider. Transcultural psychiatry is a branch of psychiatry concerned with the cultural dimensions of mental disorders, from onset to recovery.
