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Defeat Depression Campaign

Attitudes towards depression: some medical anthropological queries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Sushrut Jadhav
Affiliation:
Centre for Medical Anthropology, University College London, WC1E 6BT
Roland Littlewood
Affiliation:
Departments of Psychiatry and Anthropology, University College London, WC1E 6BT
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The vigorous public profile adopted by the College in the ‘Defeat Depression’ campaign (Psychiatric Bulletin, 1993, 17, 573–574) is to be welcomed, but the proposed educational programme is premature. The MORI poll is not an adequate basis for understanding how ‘depression’ is popularly conceived nor how people respond to it. The research report (Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1992) says little about the methods used in the qualitative part of the study: whether the researchers were properly trained in ethnographic field interviewing to elicit illness categorisations, and their ability to elicit the whole complex of ideas and actions, involving nomenclature, causation, agency, recognition and recourse to treatment.

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Briefings
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1994

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