“Back in our day, we never had to face problems like depression or anxiety. When the going got tough, we would take it as a challenge instead of crying about it.”
I can guarantee you that irrespective of your country, culture or language, you must have heard this from at least one senior member of your family. My acquaintance with the saying came when I was going through a severe episode of clinical depression.
Interestingly, my education in psychology made me first dismiss the notion of depression now existing in the 50s or 60s outright.
On closer inspection, I found, to my utter amazement that the elders were right*!
(*- T&C Apply)
At least in some sense.
Carstairs & The Sole Depressive of 1958
GM Carstairs was a British psychiatrist who was infatuated with Indian culture, Hinduism in particular.
He wrote often on the philosophical literature in the Indic religion and in 1958, he spent a year conducting a study in a small village of Kerala.
At this time, as per his own records, he interacted with at least 2,400 villagers. Only one (!!) of them was depressed.
Were Indians just more resistant to this mental illness? Was the illness really a western construct that did not replicate in eastern cultures? Or was clinical depression a consequence of the decadent western culture compared to the moral;y ‘righteous’ and simple life of India?
Hypotheses were thrown around left and right.
The Trend Continues
Carstairs was not alone in observing a low rate of depression in Indian samples. A study in 1964 reported zero cases of depression across their samples. Another one in 1973 claimed that the prevalence of clinical depression was hardly 1% in most of India.
Imagine that!
The two decades between 1950-70 were those of great political, social and economic strife in the country. We had just become independent and were trying to find our way in the free world. States were being reorganized on linguistic lines. Famines were common. Jobs were hard to come by and we regularly had wars with our neighbouring countries.
Is it really possible that so few people were depressed in a country going through so much? Or was it because of all this that Indians could not “afford” to be depressed?
Depression, Luxuries and Psychoanalysis
At the time the psychiatrists put the low rates of depression down to the simple lifestyle of India compared to the west. This comes from a view that depression is an illness only the rich can afford.
“Modern civilization, technological complexity and rapidly changing social values seem to be some of the factors contributing to the depressive psychopathology”
Sethi, B. B., Nathawat, S. S., & Gupta, S. C. (1973)
The idea is still prevalent in most parts of the country.
But I don’t buy this explanation.
If this were true, the poorest countries in modern times would have the lowest rates of depression globally. They usually don’t.
I think there is another explanation for the apparent absence of depression in India in the 50s and 60s. It has to do with how we understood depression at the time.
In the 60s, the DSM, which is used to diagnose mental disorders, was heavily influenced by psychoanalysis. At the time, this was the definition of depression that professionals used to diagnose the disorder.
“This disorder is manifested by an excessive reaction of depression due to an internal conflict or to an identifiable event such as the loss of a love object or cherished possession”
Now compare that with the modern criteria for diagnosing clinical depression.
Do you notice the change in detailing and experiences between the two?
Psychoanalysis often compared depression with mourning and melancholia, following on from Freud’s influential paper but it was too vague to be applied to different people and cultures.
Today, we have a more detailed and deeper understanding of the experience of clinical depression.
Psychology has improved on the tools it uses to identify pathological behaviour in people. They are not perfect, but they are definitely much more precise than they used to be.
Were Our Elders Right?
So when our elders told us depression didn’t exist in their time, were they right?
They were and they were not. It is quite likely that they read about the low prevalence of depression in newspapers and carried the notion with them.
The tools psychiatry and psychology used to identify depression were of very low quality. After all, records of depressive behaviour date back as long as at least 13th century London.
Is it truly possible that it went missing for a 20-year period in a newly independent India only?
I wonder how many people suffered in silence unable to understand what they were going through and how many had to suffer ‘exorcisms’ to get the spirits out of them.
We may never know the true reality of depression in India at the time.