Stigma and the Social Contagion of Depression in the Context of Structural Violence

• In Event: 343 - Section on Medical Sociology Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 19. Violence and Health

Abstract

Depression is on the rise in Chile with an increase in the use of antidepressants and the establishment of a national healthcare program providing coverage for care for depression. While some may question the shifting biological bases for recent explosions of depression diagnoses, this paper demonstrates using qualitative data that shifting social perspectives and understandings of depression allowed it to be the acceptable and even desirable mental illness to have while simultaneously being stigmatized. Data come from an ethnography of the psychiatric departments of two public hospitals in Santiago, Chile, including participant observation and interviews. This paper concludes by exploring the connections that may exist between the seeming social contagion of the clinical labeling of experience as depression and the political violence of the dictatorship period. The normalization of depression as a “way of life” is thus considered as a lasting effect of the repressive Pinochet regime (1973-1990).

Author

• Courtney A. Cuthbertson, Michigan State University