Postnatal depression across cultures: conceptual and methodological considerations

Abstract

The paper examines critically the on-going debate concerning the nature of postnatal depression (PND), its incidence, its techniques of identification and measurement. The arguments related to the universality and the culture-specificity of postnatal depression are examined from a medical, anthropological and psychological perspective.

The Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS) is singled out for a closer examination in terms of its usefulness and its validity as a measure of PND. It is argued that the measuring instruments designed in western cultures (e.g. the EPDS, and other scales of depression), for a variety of reasons, are of limited usefulness when used in non-western cultures because their constructions rest largely on ‘etic’ considerations, which have little or no meaning in non-western cultures. To understand the problem of postnatal depression in non-western cultures, different assumptions and techniques in keeping with emic formulations are required to understand the nature, the incidence, and the severity of postnatal depression

Keywords:

• postnatal depression
• cultural variations
• the EPDS
• scales of depression
• emic/etic formulations