Depression may be a trending topic, but as the data shows, much of it remains taboo: invisible, misunderstood, and largely untreated.
Image by Michaela from Pixabay
You must keep positive. You’re just having a bad day. If you pray harder, you’ll feel much better. Snap out of it. These are some of the many sentences that may sound well-meaning to the ear, to anyone’s ears – except for those of a person with depression. Yet, these are the dominant narratives that most people, and society at large, want to impose on anyone who dares to admit they live with depression. These words come from love, tradition, and centuries of well-meaning sentiments. And today, they are killing people – slowly, silently, through misunderstanding, stigma and shame.
Officially, depression is a medical condition. In clinical terms, it is labelled Major Depressive Disorder with precise diagnostic criteria: five or more symptoms lasting at least two weeks, with depressed mood or loss of interest as core features. But in everyday conversation, “depression” has become something far less defined. It’s mostly seen as a mood disorder that can be fixed with a spa day, a yoga session, or a restful evening involving a bubble bath. If only that were possible. The democratisation of mental health awareness through today’s digital world is great news. It means more and more people are aware of what it means to battle an invisible illness every day. However, it remains a largely surface-level understanding, as evidenced by the confused public discourse on what constitutes a remedy for an actual medical condition (I have yet to see evidence that diabetes can be cured with well-meaning words only, and a walk in nature).
Depending on which WHO report one looks at, somewhere between 280 and 330 million people worldwide have depression. A discrepancy that itself reveals how difficult it is to report exact data on an illness that remains largely undiagnosed and heavily stigmatised across much of the world. And the available figures only account for the visible part of the iceberg: the diagnosed cases. To put that in perspective, it is the equivalent of having nearly the entire population of the United States living with depression.
These staggering figures exist alongside a strange and sad reality ; mental health is everywhere on social media, making the conversation louder, while losing its seriousness. Scroll TikTok or Instagram, and you’ll find therapy-speak, wellness tips, and mental health check-ins constantly. Depression feels like it’s been part of public discourse for decades, though it’s really only gained this visibility in the last few years. Some even call depression a saturated topic. But saturation isn’t the same as understanding. Depression may be a trending topic, but as the data shows, much of it remains taboo: invisible, misunderstood, and in most cases very much untreated. And to make the contradiction even starker, people with depression tend to share more negative content online, yet perceive their network as less helpful than those without depression, as noted by psychologist Ethan Kross in his book Chatter. Making the visibility paradox go beyond theory; those in most need of support are speaking up online, but sharing their pain doesn’t translate into getting the help they need. Instead, the perception remains that of being lazy, weak, and even to blame for being depressed.
Anyone can be affected – regardless of gender, background, age or socio-economic situation. This much we know. What sadly gets lost in awareness campaigns is that women are affected at rates 1.5 times higher than men. And oftentimes, the symptoms themselves are misread: what might be depression gets interpreted as inherent feminine traits: sensitivity, moodiness, emotionality. Women’s nurturing behaviour, their composure, their emotional displays – these aren’t always personality traits; sometimes they’re symptoms of an illness being filtered through societal gendered expectations. This is a textbook case of how wider social expectations not only amplify the stigma but also dangerously obscure the malady itself. What is often dismissed as sensitivity or weakness should be allowed space to be what it sometimes is: the screaming signalling an illness.
I was part of this statistic. I know depression intimately. It first visited me many years ago, and I was lucky to find relief mostly through therapy, pharmaceutical help and a strong support system. I credit the clinical psychologist I was fortunate to find back then for teaching me how to heal, and for the tools that made my healing possible – namely mindfulness meditation, and emotional exposure, which I still use to this day to care for my mental health. I remember one session well, during which she explained that early therapy believed awareness of illness was tantamount to healing. But as the field evolved, practitioners realised awareness was merely the starting point. Healing was an entirely separate journey.
That journey looks very different depending on where you are in the world. But also who you are; depression’s invisibility isn’t just about gender, it’s deeply cultural too. And some taboos manage to transcend geography entirely. Ask any man, anywhere in the world, how easy it is to admit that he’s struggling. The masculine script remains glaringly similar and consistent whether you’re in Toronto or Tokyo, New York or Nairobi, Lagos or London; strength, stoicism, self-reliance, and silence are chief markers of what any man must be. Should be – according to society and moeurs. While women face higher rates of depression, men face higher rates of death from it; the sobering statistic shows that men account for nearly 70% of suicide deaths globally. And while suicide is the result of multiple, complex factors, it remains closely intertwined with depression – and the stigma that discourages people from seeking help. Well-meaning words can, unwittingly, reinforce that silence.
The universality of depression is a fact that is challenged depending on the cultural context one lives in. In much of the Middle East, Africa and the Global South, depression has always been stigmatised. It’s often something that is talked about, but the paradox is that it is not characterised correctly; usually seen as something that can and should be cured by specific prayers and positive thinking, something from the divine, a test from above. And whilst it may feel true culturally, it boils down to something that should be cured by a doubling down of prayers commensurate with the threshold of pain. Something akin to praying your way out of depression. And sadly still, depression and any mental health ailments are seen with the same stigma the West had started to combat many decades ago – with a narrative equating mental illness to “madness” and the need for straitjackets. Or that such a person has been affected by something only the supernatural realm can explain. Going to therapy in these parts of the world is just as stigmatised; whilst it may become an act seen as one of strength, maturity and courage in the West, it only serves as confirmation of said “madness” in many non-Western cultures. This often explains the reluctance to seek it.
I understood this divide firsthand. During the years I spent in the Middle East, I witnessed how depression manifested differently – not as sadness to be discussed in therapy, but as physical ailments, spiritual struggles, and work stress that were better not named as mental illness. The infrastructure was there: gyms, spas, wellness centres, and the wonders of nature too; year-round sunshine, stunning beaches and spectacular scenery. Western-style therapy existed too – that’s how I was diagnosed and treated – but it catered primarily to expat communities, operating in a parallel world to the local understanding of mental health. The cultural framework to acknowledge psychological suffering was largely absent. When I experienced my first diagnosed depression during those years, it became clear that no amount of self-care could counterbalance environments where acknowledging struggle meant admitting weakness, particularly in hierarchical, patriarchal workplace cultures where emotional vulnerability was incompatible with professional survival.
This parallel existence wasn’t unique to the Middle East. It’s the pattern everywhere mental health has ‘globalised’ – Western psychiatric frameworks arriving without the cultural infrastructure to support them. And the divide runs deeper than infrastructure. In much of the Global South, depression isn’t experienced primarily as psychological distress but as physical symptoms: headaches, fatigue, bodily pain. It’s not denial or ignorance; it’s a fundamentally different way of experiencing and expressing suffering. Yet the frameworks being exported worldwide – the diagnostic criteria, the evidence-based treatments – were developed by the West, for Western expressions of distress. When those frameworks become the universal standard, they don’t create understanding. They create confusion and, ironically, reinforce the very taboos they claim to dismantle. We’ve democratised the vocabulary of mental health without democratising the understanding. The trend of awareness hasn’t dismantled the taboo; in many places, it’s simply dressed it in a new language.
My own healing proved that East and West don’t have to be at odds – they can, and should, coexist. My therapist didn’t choose between frameworks; she drew from both. Western clinical training met Eastern wisdom in the same room, and that integration is what made healing possible; very early on, Dr Lemay shared Rumi’s Guest House with me – a poem I still refer to today. “Welcome and entertain them all,” he wrote, even the sorrows that sweep through your house. It was the first time I saw depression not as an intruder to evict, but as a visitor to understand – uninvited, yes, but not without meaning.
What I learned through years of therapy – that knowing about my depression and understanding it were entirely different things – has since been confirmed by research. The treatment gap persists not because people don’t know depression exists, but because awareness alone cannot overcome the deeply embedded social expectations and internalised stigmas that prevent people from seeking or accepting help.
The WHO’s extension of its mental health action plan from 2020 to 2030 matters, but only if it addresses what made the original goals unattainable. Scaling up access is meaningless without cultural adaptation, and equally meaningless if treatment remains economically out of reach. Therapy has become a luxury when it should be essential, affordable only to a sliver of the global population. And here’s the bitter irony: we express outrage about AI chatbots replacing human therapists while maintaining a system so prohibitively expensive that people have no choice but to turn to algorithms and large language models. Real healing requires not just cultural adaptation but economic accessibility: training local practitioners, subsidising care, integrating traditional and modern approaches – rather than leaving people to choose between crippling costs and impersonal technology.
Depression may never disappear entirely, but the way we speak about it should change. My therapist was right: awareness was just the starting point. The real work – both individual and societal – comes after. And there is indeed no time like the present to transform the taboo into a trend that includes not only awareness but understanding – the only path to healing.
If this resonated with you, I’d love to hear your story at hello@evenkeeled.co or through my social media channels. More importantly, if you or someone you know is struggling with depression or thoughts of self-harm, please contact a mental health professional, your local crisis helpline, or a trusted person in your life. You don’t have to navigate this alone.