Beyond the Blues: Towards a Cross-Cultural Phenomenology of Depressed Mood

Abstract

Background: There is a great cultural variety in the social phenomenology of depressed mood. The aim of this qualitative study was to compare English and Laotian Hmong semantic and pragmatic differences in depressed mood and to assess their relevance for cross-cultural psychiatric research and practice. Sampling and Method: The first author conducted long-term ethnographic fieldwork from 2000 to 2002 among the Hmong in Laos. Methods included participant observation, interviews and focus group interviews in the Hmong language. The semantic and pragmatic context of Hmong depressed mood tu siab, literally translated as ‘broken liver’, is compared to that of ‘sadness’ in Western contexts. Results: Hmong ‘broken liver’ and English ‘sadness’ are deeply shaped by culture-specific premises concerning notions of social interaction, morality, interiority, socialisation, and cosmology. Conclusions: Critical attention has to be paid when assessing depressed mood cross-culturally. A social phenomenology combining qualitative and quantitative methods should be developed to analyse important semantic and pragmatic differences of depressed mood across cultural contexts.