I suspect depression is hugely underreported in low income countries where life satisfaction is lower. I don’t know how on earth they surveyed for depression, then there’s not even a concept really of “depression” in many low income settings, like Uganda here. Mental illness is only understood in the context of those with severe psychosis and mania. Only recently have organisations like Strong Minds raised the profile a little bit, but its suuuuuper early days,
I can’t speak to sub-Saharan Africa, but in India the government have put together a very comprehensive survey of mental wellbeing, which they ran in 2016 and are running again now. They randomly sampled households across the country, and asked people about their feelings and symptoms, which they then categorised into different mental conditions, rather than asking directly. This found results that largely concurred with previous GBD estimates for India. But I can’t say for sure whether there might be other biases, and there are almost certainly issues with the GBD’s Africa estimates due to a lack of ground truth data in many regions and methodological issues.
Here’s a paper on the kinds of surveys and interviews used to form the GBD prevalence estimates, and here’s one arguing that prevalence is sharply underestimated.
I suspect depression is hugely underreported in low income countries where life satisfaction is lower. I don’t know how on earth they surveyed for depression, then there’s not even a concept really of “depression” in many low income settings, like Uganda here. Mental illness is only understood in the context of those with severe psychosis and mania. Only recently have organisations like Strong Minds raised the profile a little bit, but its suuuuuper early days,
I can’t speak to sub-Saharan Africa, but in India the government have put together a very comprehensive survey of mental wellbeing, which they ran in 2016 and are running again now. They randomly sampled households across the country, and asked people about their feelings and symptoms, which they then categorised into different mental conditions, rather than asking directly. This found results that largely concurred with previous GBD estimates for India. But I can’t say for sure whether there might be other biases, and there are almost certainly issues with the GBD’s Africa estimates due to a lack of ground truth data in many regions and methodological issues.
Here’s a paper on the kinds of surveys and interviews used to form the GBD prevalence estimates, and here’s one arguing that prevalence is sharply underestimated.