ABSTRACT
The experience of depression is familiar-we can all share to some extent someone’s unhappiness or despair. It might be assumed then that depression can be easily recognized in all communities. But, precisely because sadness or happiness are everyday occurrences, we already have available cultural mechanisms for understanding them, for modifying them and for incorporating them into our social life. It seems possible that certain patterns of depression are specifically found in industrialized societies. The apparent total absence of depression among the subject peoples of the colonial empires was used to justify the assumption that Africans and Asians were incapable of examining their feelings, had difficulty expressing their emotions and were less likely to have a distinct personality. In this chapter we shall look at some of the difficulties involved in comparing mental experiences of people in different societies and then look at a young student from West Africa who became depressed while studying in Britain.
