ISSN:
0011-3204
Language:
English
Titel der Quelle:
Current anthropology
Publ. der Quelle:
Chicago, Ill : Univ. of Chicago Press
Angaben zur Quelle:
Vol. 57, No. 5 (2016), p. 610-631
DDC:
570
Abstract:
Primary care clinicians treat the majority of cases of depression in the United States. The primary care clinic is also a site for enactment of a disease-oriented concept of depression that locates disorder within an individual body. Drawing on theories of the self and stigma, this article highlights problematics of primary care depression treatment by examining the lived experience of depression. The data come from individuals who screened positive for depressive symptoms in primary care settings and were followed over 10 years. After iterative mixed-methodological exploration of a large data set, we analyzed interviews from a purposive sample of 46 individuals by means of grounded and phenomenological approaches. We describe two major results. First, we note that depression is experienced as located within and inextricable from relational space and that the self is experienced as relational, rather than autonomous, in depression. Second, we describe the ways in which the experience of depression contradicts a disease-oriented concept such that help seeking intensifies rather than alleviates the relational problem of depression. We conclude by highlighting that an understanding of illness experience may be essential to improving primary care depression treatment and by questioning the bracketing of relational concerns in depression within the construct of stigma.
Note:
Copyright: © 2016 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved.
URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/688506
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