![Sample our Communication Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, 2013 & 2014 volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5927/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Information-Science2.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This study explores depression and treatments among U.S.-born Mexican Americans. Through Differential Adaptation Theory and a culture-centered approach prioritizing voz and intersectionality, 18 interviewees discuss how within-group communication influences depression experience and treatment paths. All participants are insured and understand biomedical options with insurance. Intersectional data analysis reveals that biomedical options are a last resort. This Latina/o subgroup questions dominant structures through agentic choices that privilege face-saving cultural tendencies, family/kin relationship context, changing gender roles, and collectivist–individualist negotiation. Implications include challenging the dominant communicative framing of biomedical treatments as superior. The centrality of family/kin as powerful social support and instrumental in decision-making processes, the gender-race-age intersection, and intergenerational communication implicate agency in determining preferable coping mechanisms beyond biomedical bounds.
Acknowledgments
Special thanks to Barbara Sharf, Alberto Gonzalez, and Marissa Doshi for providing feedback on earlier drafts of the manuscript.
Notes
1. Simpatia refers to relationship harmony, familismo refers to family/kin closeness and loyalty, personalismo refers to interpersonal familiarity or rapport, respeto refers to respect, and confianza refers to trust and reciprocity.
2. For an in-depth discussion of self-reflexivity, intersectionality, positionality, and methodological implications of the human instrument researcher as minority in-group member of the population studied, see Bhattacharya (Citation2009), Dutta (2010), and Hill Collins and Bilge (Citation2016).