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Negotiations of distress between East Timorese and Vietnamese refugees and their family doctors in Melbourne

Lookup NU author(s): Professor Carl May

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Abstract

Recent critiques of depression have contested its coherence as a concept and highlighted its performance in medicalising distress. Studies of depression in a cross-cultural context have focused on language and belief systems as technical barriers to practice that need to be overcome in enacting depression work. This paper seeks to locate culture within the broader socio-structural context of depression care in general practice. The paper draws on interviews with five general practitioners (GPs), and 24 patients from Vietnamese and East Timorese backgrounds who predominantly have left their home as refugees. Each had been diagnosed with depression or prescribed antidepressants. These patients gave accounts of distress deeply embedded within, and inseparable from, lives fraught with frightening pre-migration experiences, traumatic escape and profound dislocation and alienation in their new 'home'. Fragmented lives were contrasted with the nourishing social fabric of homes left behind. GP participants were involved in a process of engaging with a profoundly communal and structural account of emotional distress while defending and drawing on an individualised notion of depression in performing their work and accounting for the pain presented to them. © 2010 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2010 Foundation for the Sociology of Health & Illness/Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Publication metadata

Author(s): Kokanovic R, May C, Dowrick C, Furler J, Newton D, Gunn J

Publication type: Article

Publication status: Published

Journal: Sociology of Health and Illness

Year: 2010

Volume: 32

Issue: 4

Pages: 511-527

Print publication date: 15/04/2010

ISSN (print): 0141-9889

ISSN (electronic): 1467-9566

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9566.2009.01228.x

DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9566.2009.01228.x

PubMed id: 20412463

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