# Do people in poor rural Third World countries get depressed as often as us?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-people-in-poor-rural-third-world-countries-get-depressed-as-often-as-us/619697>\
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion\
**Created:** [April 23, 2012, 3:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-people-in-poor-rural-third-world-countries-get-depressed-as-often-as-us/619697 "2012-04-23T15:59:02Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Maastricht](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/a88e57/32.png) [@Maastricht](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maastricht)\
**Post date:** [April 23, 2012, 3:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-people-in-poor-rural-third-world-countries-get-depressed-as-often-as-us/619697/1 "2012-04-23T15:59:02Z")

</div>

Google [says no](http://www.prb.org/Articles/2006/DepressionaLeadingContributortoGlobalBurdenofDisease.aspx).  
I can imagine that depression is more common in cultures where women are second rate citizens. And indeed, “Suicide is one of the leading causes of death in young women in India and China.” Pakistan is bad, too.

So how about Africa? The land of perpetual big smiles, family values, the land where people are outdoors in the sun all the time, do physical work all the time, are surrounded by family all the time? Where they get enough sleep because there is no TV? You’d think depression would be less there, right? They do exactly what our doctors order.  
And indeed, depression there [IS different](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9791599):

> [@](#):
>
> We now have a better knowledge of the specific features of depression in sub-Saharan Africa. Anthropologically speaking, the Western model is irrelevant. Depression in sub-Saharan Africa involves the relationship of the subject to himself or others in a mode specific to African cultures. Ignoring this fact can lead to simplistic ethnocentrism. From a clinical standpoint, depressive illness characterized by somatic manifestations, delusions of persecution, and anxiety are increasingly uncommon. As African societies modernize, these traditional forms are being gradually supplanted by states with symptoms and prognoses more like those observed in industrialized countries. Hybrid depressive syndromes are now the most widespread. Epidemiologically the notion widely held only a few decades ago that depression is a rare occurrence in Africa has now been dispelled.

In writing this post, I pretty much answered my own question, but I’d still thought I would share. It is kind of interesting.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![even\_sven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/dfb087/32.png) [@even\_sven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/even_sven)\
**Post date:** [April 23, 2012, 4:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-people-in-poor-rural-third-world-countries-get-depressed-as-often-as-us/619697/2 "2012-04-23T16:57:59Z")

</div>

It can be tough to wrap your head around, but illness is often very culturally specific- even straightforward stuff. For example, if you are unable to walk a mile in the US, you are probably not in great shape, but less than disabled. But if you can’t walk a mile someplace where the well is two miles away, you have a serious disability. Likewise if you can’t see well enough to read in the US, you are highly disabled. In a less literate society, your eyes can get pretty blurry without you being “blind.”

Mental illness is pretty much always blurry, because our very definition of mental illness is “some problem that inhibits your ability to live a normal life.” A normal life, of course, can mean all kinds of things.

[Crazy Like Us](http://www.amazon.com/Crazy-Like-Us-Globalization-American/dp/141658708X) is a very interesting book about how ideas of mental health work (or don’t work) across cultures