The Monster Within: Understanding the Narratives of Depression

Abstract

The study examines how lay people understand and recover from depression. Narrative interviews exploring the same were conducted with twenty five participants. Each narrative offered an idiosyncratic understanding of the unique journey of depression. Several patterns from the narrative emerged which were collected as themes—depression was seen as a normal, explainable and sometimes even expected phenomenon in case of extreme negative events, psychiatrists were considered opaque in understanding the experience of depression, and lay understanding of depression of the participant and their social group deeply affected self-recovery. The study offers insight into how a vast majority of the population goes through depressive experience in face of personal tragedies and recovers without much professional help. It thus has implications for augmenting the recovery of lay people from depressive symptoms.