by Dana Francisco Miranda
The white world, the only honorable one, barred me from all participation. A man was expected to behave like a man. I was expected to behave like a black man—or at least like a nigger. I shouted a greeting to the world and the world slashed away my joy.
—Frantz Fanon (1952)
Depression is one of the most common mental disorders and is ranked by the World Health Organization (WHO) as the single largest contributor to disability worldwide (“Depression and Other Common Mental Disorders: Global Health Estimates,” 1996). It is perhaps for this reason that WHO took the opportunity during World Health Day to launch a series of national conversations in the Republic of Cabo Verde. These community-led events, entitled “Depressão: Vamos conversar,” highlighted the need to bring greater understanding to depression within the islands and also provided support regarding the diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of the illness.
What does philosophy have to offer in such efforts? In particular, what does Africana philosophy tell us about depression affecting kriolus?
Studies regarding psychiatric illnesses among Cabo Verdeans, Cabo Verdean-Americans, and the many other constituents of this far-flung diaspora have not been many. In fact, one could only point to three works that examine psychosocial distress within the Cabo Verdean diaspora: People with a Mission: Meanings of Psychosocial Distress of Cape Verdean migrants in The Netherlands, 2004; “Cape Verdeans’ Pathways to Health: Local Problems, Transnational Solutions,” 2008; and “Perspectives on quality mental health care from Brazilian and Cape Verdean outpatients: Implications for effective patient-centered policies and models of care,” 2014). There is one work in English concerned with depression in Cabo Verde itself: “Depressive Symptoms in Older People of San Vicente—Cape Verde (Africa)” (2013).
The lack of empirical studies regarding mental disorders is not only troubling, but also points to a larger issue within psychiatry regarding population selection and methodology.
In the United States, the first problem can be seen in the failure of psychological studies to differentiate black immigrants or ethnicities (such as Cabo Verdean). Most psychiatric studies regarding the mental health of individuals from the African diaspora either categorize all participants as African American (“black”) or allow for the differentiation of Caribbean blacks. This fails to take seriously the distinct histories and environments that shape mental health within Africa and the African diaspora.
Moreover, as a methodological issue, this lack of differentiation results in diagnoses and treatments that do not take full account of an individual’s psychosocial situation.
For instance, depression is conventionally understood as a mood disorder that causes persistent and severe feelings of despondency and loss of interest in previously rewarding or enjoyable activities. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V), a diagnosis of Major Depressive Disorder must consist of either depressed moods or disinterestedness along with five (or more) additional symptoms, such as significant weight loss or weight gain, insomnia or hypersomnia, daily agitation or fatigue, diminished ability to think, excessive feelings of worthlessness or guilt, as well as recurrent suicidal ideation. These symptoms are not culturally grounded, nor do they consider etiological causes from structural dysfunction. In other words, although diagnostic criteria (DSM-V) might easily provide reliable criteria for depression, it also loses specificity. Here the importance of Africana philosophy becomes paramount.
Africana phenomenology (which include Lewis Gordon, Paget Henry, Anthony Neal, Dwayne Tunstall) and Black existentialism (which include W.E.B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, Frantz Fanon, Lorraine Hansberry, William R. Jones, Lewis Gordon, Nella Larson, Richard Wright) are two philosophical fields that explore the lived-experience of being black in “systematically deranged” worlds. Thus, the question of experiencing depression must always require looking at the precise socio-political arrangements that are the grounds of one’s experience. For Africana people, the question then becomes: What does it mean to be “depressed” while living under conditions of antiblack racism and coloniality? What does it mean to be both black and depressed?
Whereas Euromodern phenomenology advances a bracketing or parenthesizing of the “natural attitude” and ontological assumptions regarding the structure of experience, Africana phenomenology and its existential variants bring into focus those cultural conditions that affect the meaning and presentation of experiences. As Paget Henry argues, “This cultural approach to phenomenology is an unusual one as it culturally conditions the certainty of self-reflective knowledge and raises very explicitly the need to do phenomenology from a comparative cultural perspective” (“Africana Phenomenology: Its Philosophical Implications,” 27).
Insofar as Africana phenomenology brings into focus cultural conditions affecting the lives of black people and Black existentialism concerns the existence of Africana people in specific contexts, these fields help to illuminate some of the cultural dynamics of depression as experienced through the body, consciousness, and living in the world.
Although this cannot be fully explored here, one important dimension of examining depression through Africana philosophies is the typicality of what I term “de-situatedness.” The philosopher Matthew Ratcliffe argues that “human experience incorporates an ordinarily pre-reflective sense of ‘belonging to a shared world’, which is altered in depression” (Experiences of Depression: A Study in Phenomenology, 2). This mundane sense of belonging or situatedness (Befindlichkeit) is, however, absent or is experienced not as belonging but instead as confinement in an antiblack world. This can be seen in Ralph Ellison’s examination of the phrase “I’m nowhere” in Harlem, in which, “One ‘is’ literally, but one is nowhere; one wanders dazed in a ghetto maze, a ‘displaced person’ of American democracy” (“Harlem Is Nowhere,” 57) or in Lewis Gordon’s examination of black melancholia as black people “people being supposedly illegitimate in the world to which they are indigenous” (“Black Existence in Philosophy of Culture,” 104).
This not-being-at-home is particularly relevant for understanding the types of depression that many Africana people experience, the experience of having one’s joy slashed away. If antiblackness and coloniality are structures and not merely events, then these factors do not only initiate and/or exacerbate mental disorder but also can be seen as part of the racialized affects and experiences particular to Afro-diasporic subjects. De-situatedness thus captures the ground of experience for Africana people in antiblack environments.
Whereas Ratcliffe sees depression as the erosion of moods as a whole—as the erosion of situatedness (Befindlichkeit), Africana philosophies reveal that although de-situated subjects experience non-belonging in the world, this does not automatically translate into periods of dysfunction or erosions of moods.
Many black people fail to become depressed. However, this does not mean that the phenomenon of de-situatedness is not itself harmful or dysfunctional. If social dysfunction is a cause of depression, or exasperates its symptoms for some African people, then it is necessary to understand and alleviate the socially produced manifestations of depression. As such, by turning to the works of Africana psychiatrists (James Comer, Frantz Fanon, Chabani Manganyi, Alvin Poussaint) we also get a clearer examination of the connections between mood disorders and societal dysfunction.
In particular, Fanonian sociotherapy (“sociodiagnostics”) provides clear reasons for how alleviating societal problems is integral to the treatment of mental illness. Sociodiagnostics moves beyond psychiatry in arguing for socio-political action and socio-political restructuring as conditions for well-being. As Fanon wrote, “Hence we are driven from the individual back to the social structure. If there is a taint, it lies not in the ‘soul’ of the individual but rather in that of the environment” (Black Skins, White Masks, 65).
What then does all this have to do with Cabo Verde and kriolus? In order to be culturally responsive, diagnostic explanations regarding depression must be “situational.” For Fanon, a “situational diagnosis” is one in which the social structure is examined alongside mental disorders as a critical factor. This means taking in account not only “relations with his associates, his occupations and his preoccupations, his sexuality, his sense of security or of insecurity, the dangers that threaten him; and we may add also his evolution, the story of his life” (Toward the African Revolution, 10), but also in 1950s Algeria, the structure of colonial violence. What situations do Cabo Verdeans find themselves in? How do these situations mediate mental disorders?
Within Cabo Verde specifically, depression reaches 4.9% of the population (24,240 people). This is not to say that depression does not affect members of the greater Cabo Verdean diaspora. However, there are no accurate numbers surrounding the amount of Kriolus or Kriolas experiencing depreson (depression). Moreover, my ancestral island of Fogo not only has the highest rate of suicide within the archipelago but also has historically been identified with self-harm. The dysphemism often given to members of the island is “Dôdu de Fogo,” which translated from Cape Verdean Creole (Kriolu) means “The Ill of Fogo” and connotes both madness and idiocy. This nickname refers to the way in which the historical prevalence of depression and suicide has resulted in people from Fogo being seen as willing to hurt themselves rather than other people.
Depreson is treated then as an inheritance or “preexisting condition” unique Fogo. These cultural explanations also travel throughout the Cabo Verdean diaspora. As Huub Beijers states, “Cape Verdeans made clear that the explanatory models they used in relation to their experiences of psychosocial distress can differ significantly from the ones that are dominant in psychiatry or described in biomedicine in The Netherlands” (People with a Mission, x).
These explanatory models can often be divided into three general categories of understanding: psychological-medical, inheritable, and/or supernatural. In the first mode, suicide and depression are situated as psychopathologies that can be diagnosed and treated according to general medical knowledge. The second mode follows a genealogy of inheritance in which depression and suicidal ideation are traits and dispositions born from a cultural lineage that is passed on not only from parent to child but also from island to inhabitants. Finally, the third mode treats depression and suicide as maledictions or curses from bruxa (witches) whose treatments consist of traditional healing and fetishes, such as with the kônta d’odju (an amulet made of black beads with white spots worn to protect one from the evil eyes of others). Although this last model is often regulated to older generations of Cabo Verdeans, these explanations all impart meaning.
By examining Kriolu notions of depreson (depression), sodadi (longing for or missing someone or something), suisida (suicide) and mata kabêsa (to commit suicide), alongside the structure of de-situatedness and the particularities of this creolized and diasporic nation, one would be better able to understand depression for Cabo Verdeans. Further, in enacting a sociodiagnostics and making use of Africana philosophy one could also better understand depression itself.
Dana Francisco Miranda is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut-Storrs. His research is in political philosophy, Africana philosophy, and 19th century and contemporary European thought. His current work investigates the philosophical significance of suicide, depression and well-being for members of the Africana Diaspora. He currently serves as the Secretary of Graduate Outreach and Chair of Architectonics for the Caribbean Philosophical Association and is a Junior Research Fellow at the Applied Ethics Center, UMass-Boston
References
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Beijers Huub. 2004. People with a Mission: Meanings of Psychosocial Distress of Cape Verdean immigrants in The Netherlands. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam.
Beijers, Huub and Cláudia de Freitas. 2008. “Cape Verdeans’ Pathways to Health: Local Problems, Transnational Solutions.” Transnational Archipelago: Perspectives on Cape Verdean Migration and Diaspora. Eds. Luís Batalha and Jørgen Carling. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
De Jesus, Maria and Tara Earl. 2014. “Perspectives on quality mental health care from Brazilian and Cape Verdean outpatients: Implications for effective patient-centered policies and models of care.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies on Health and Well-Being.
“Depression and Other Common Mental Disorders: Global Health Estimates.” 2017. Geneva: World Health Organization.
Ellison, Ralph. 1964. “Harlem Is Nowhere.” Harper’s Magazine.
Fanon, Frantz. 1967. Toward the African Revolution: Political Essays, trans. Haakon Chevalier. New York: Monthly Review,
——. 1986. Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove.
Gordon, Lewis R. 2012. “Black Existence in Philosophy of Culture,” Diogenes 59, nos. 3–4: 96–105.
Henry, Paget. 2016. “Africana Phenomenology: Its Philosophical Implications,” in Jane Anna Gordon, Lewis R. Gordon, Paget Henry, Aaron Kamugisha, and Neil Roberts (eds.), Journeys in Caribbean Thought: The Paget Henry Reader. London, UK: Rowman & Littlefield International, 27–58.
Pereira, Henrique, Arminda Reis, Rosa Marina Afonso, Graça Esgalhado, Samuel Monteiro and Manuel Loureiro. 2013. “Depressive Symptoms in Older People of San Vicente—Cape Verde (Africa).” Journal of Psychiatry 18.
Ratcliffe, Matthew. 2015. Experiences of Depression: A Study in Phenomenology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
