The Making of an Epidemic: Depression Multiple and Glocal Mental Health in Kerala

<strong>Centre for the Study of Social Systems School of Social Sciences</strong> <strong>CSSS Colloquium</strong> <strong>Dr. Claudia Lang</strong> (Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich) Will be presenting a paper on <strong>The Making of an Epidemic: Depression Multiple and Glocal Mental Health in Kerala</strong> <strong>Date : August 4, 2016 </strong> <strong>Abstract:</strong> "Depression – the silent epidemic", titled India Today in March 2015. In this paper, I trace how depression has moved from a minor clinically severe psychiatric category into a common mild and moderate disorder. In Kerala, depression is widely diagnosed with brief symptom scales and managed largely not only by mainstream psychiatrists but also by general practitioners and primary health centers, psychologists and counselors, Ayurvedic practitioners and religious healers. Stakeholders of health policy in India have increased their efforts to raise awareness of depression and to expand the mental health sector. Socio-economic and existential problems are thus reconfigured as individual disorders and localized in a neurochemical imbalance in the brain, thus medicalizing social suffering and replacing structural solutions by pharmaceutical care and (self-)surveillance. At the same time, somatization theory of depression in India with its contested colonial legacy expands the category of depression further by including multiple somatic complaints under this presumably universal disorder. Yet, the introduction of depression as a mental health category and a public health concern in India are poorly investigated. In this paper, I explore the assemblage of concepts, institutions, pharmaceuticals and practices involved in stabilizing and experiencing depression in Kerala and into the multiple ontological translations embodied in this process. Bio: Claudia Lang is a social anthropologist and research fellow at the Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich, Germany. She has done extensive fieldwork on depression and mental health, mainstream and Ayurvedic psychiatry and ritual healing in Kerala, South India and on gender and intersexuality in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. She has taught at the universities of Munich and Münster and is involved in ethnographic-historical research on the introduction of depression as a public health concern in India. She has published on Ayurvedic psychiatry, ritual healing and intersexuality. Her current book deals with the local appropriation and multiple reality of depression in Kerala.