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RIZKY: There was a commercial for a prescription for children who have depression, and I remember my dad kind of scoffing at it, and that was the general kind of idea I had about how my parents felt about depression, which is pretty common with, I think, the culture I’m from.
ELIZABETH JOHNSON: That’s Rizky, an Emory student who has asked to go by her first name. She has major depressive disorder, which is the leading cause of disability worldwide. She says that mental health is treated very differently in Indonesia, where she was born.
RIZKY: A lot of people have this mindset that mental illness is either a weakness or just something that can be solved with willpower or just isn’t real at all. There’s this big belief that, so long as you turn towards spirituality, your problems will be solved – you can pray away the sad, kind of.
JOHNSON: Joshua Jayasundara teaches an Emory course on the sociology of mental health. He says that depression appears in most cultures, but can look different and have different cures.
JOSHUA JAYASUNDARA: Where you are kind of influences how you solve it. Some cultures take the perspective that this has to be done through religion, sometimes it’s seen as a rite of passage, and sometimes it’s just neglected almost entirely. If this was in Sri Lanka, your doctor probably would not prescribe you with antidepressants.
JOHNSON: Jaysundara’s background includes Sri Lankan Tamil culture. There, rituals and family are an important part of treatment.
JAYASUNDARA: The Tamil version would be related to rituals. The idea that you need to be among family, certain things need to be done in order for depression to pass, there are rituals that need to be completed.
JOHNSON: Rituals that draw someone in to their community can promote recovery even more than North American treatments. However, people in cultures that blame mental illness on sin or weakness could benefit from the American perspective.
There’s no one solution that can remove stigma across every society. It’s important to consider how each culture supports its mentally ill. And it’s important to make sure that people like Rizky get the support they need.
Elizabeth Johnson from Emory University.
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