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Social Roles, Context and Evolution in the Origins of Depression*
This paper reviews the author's research on the social origins of depression begun in the early 1970s. It emphasizes the importance of taking account of the context and meaning of proximal causal factors by the use of investigator-based ratings using intensive interviews and the need to extend research to cover a whole lifetime. The implications of the research program that has involved some twenty inquiries in a variety of cultural settings is discussed in terms of the importance of both a comparative and an evolutionary perspective concerning meaning that bring together the biology involved in an evolutionary perspective emphasizing a common human nature with one that takes account of cultural and individual differences. In short an approach that take seriously a biopsychosocial perspective.
Unfortunately I was unable to receive in person the Leonard I. Pearlin Award for 2001, but I did manage to get to the United States in October to give lectures and seminars at Harvard and Rutgers on work carried out over thirty years with my colleagues on the etiology of depression. Such research is inevitably a collaborative affair, and most of what I will outline has in particular seen major contributions from Tirril Harris-indeed, I am sure the work would not have achieved what it has without her ideas, energy, and dedication. We have largely published in psychiatric journals, and a good deal of what I talked about turned out to be new to my audiences; I was encouraged to use this occasion to review the work. I must begin, however, with an apology. The research I discuss overlaps with important research in North America, including that by Leonard Pearlin himself. Since the 1980 watershed meeting I attended in New York-- organized by Barbara and Bruce Dohrenwend, that led to the influential volume Stressful Life Events: Their Nature and Effects in 1974-I have gained much from my many contacts in the United States, and it would be invidious to select from so many. It would require a different paper to take on board such work, and I have gone along with the licence bestowed by such an occasion to be intemperately London-- focused. I should perhaps add I know nothing...