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Paper short abstract:

Writing an anthropology of depression is a task burdened with the methodological and analytical sense of unease. Shall experience of those suffering with depression be treated as the exclusive instance of the truth versus the psychiatric conceptualizations of depression?

Paper long abstract:

Medical anthropologists often look for the truth about a certain condition from within the illness narratives. Much along the phenomenological strand, the category of experience is elevated as directly reflecting that, what is. While attending to experience can reveal important contexts related with the illness, critiques of this approach point e.g. to the analytical risks inherent in the approach like individualization/universalization of the narrating subject. In this paper is to ponder about the methodological challenges that arise in tackling the experiential content of depression - in the search for the truth.

Based on 5 problem-centred interviews with people experiencing depression, I argue that the difficulty in trying to establish what depression is, consists in separating the experience and the cultural idiom of suffering. Perhaps the truth about depression, if there is any, comes neither from the diagnostic manuals nor from the narratives and can only be reconstructed by attending to multiple voices, including alternative psychiatric research on the physiological mechanism of depression. The aim of this paper is thus to shed light on the epistemic unease and serious methodological concerns related with writing anthropology of depression. I claim that critical discourse analysis could be a useful method to tackle the public discourse on depression vis-à-vis the narratives. The analysis contributes to the emerging sociology and anthropology of depression in Poland, however its impact is not limited to the Polish scholarly circles. By advancing the methodological self-awareness, it can provide a possible model for study of depression and other conditions.