On the Culture of Depression: A Lacanian View

In our forthcoming edited volume, Lacan on Depression and Melancholia, we address two associated questions: why the paucity of reference to depression in Lacanian scholarship, and what does Lacanian theory have to offer by way of conceptualizing and treating depressive suffering? The apparent neglect of this concept (depression) in the Lacanian literature no doubt strikes many as a conspicuous omission, particularly when we are told by the World Health Organization (WHO) (2021) that the total number of people suffering from depression is approximately 280 million, that is, 3.8% of the global population (5.0% of adults and 5.7% of adults older than 60 years). It comes as no surprise, then, that along with anxiety disorders, depression is the most frequently diagnosed of all mental health ailments, and that a staggering amount of popular literature-memoirs, biographies, self-help texts-has been devoted to this topic. Depression, whether approached as a diagnostic label, the epicenter of a spiraling socio-medical/biopolitical discourse, as mode of experience, or as familiar cultural narrative, is omnipresent. It has become, both clinically and sociologically, an unavoidable concept, or, as we might put it in Lacanian terms, a master-signifier: an amorphous and encompassing term, used by so many people in so many different ways that it has become virtually impossible to dislodge, to effectively question or critique.

One response to this situation is to assert that it is precisely questioning and critique that are most urgently required. Despite enormous investments in research and evidence-based treatments, the prevalence of depression has not diminished over time-over the last decades, its impact has only increased (World Health Organization, 2017). This failure challenges the pertinence and relevance of the dominant frameworks within which depression is studied, particularly biological and cognitive psychological models, just as it accentuates the crisis of how contemp