ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an ambience — as it were — within which health workers and others can begin to understand the complex issues involved in using helpfully and realistically the psychiatric concept of depression. It considers what depression means to an individual to be depressed. A short discussion on social psychological position of ethnic minorities in British society is followed by a discussion of some social psychiatric aspects of depression in individuals from black and ethnic minority communities. The chapter examines certain sociocultural factors that have been researched in relation to depression in order to see how a sociocultural perspective can illuminate our understanding of the depressed individual. Although the findings of cross-cultural studies must be viewed with caution, a sociocultural perspective in understanding depression shows the significance of culture in determining symptomatology and the relationship of depression to gender roles, marriage and social mobility.
