Its inhabitants today face problems of unemployment and instability, as not only were state-owned farms closed but the new political-economic order and Poland's accession to the European Union have caused a radical re-shaping of the agricultural sector. It is based on a year-long ethnographic fieldwork, carried out in a peripheral region of southern Poland. This article discusses experiences of postsocialist transformation in rural Poland. Keywords: depression, psychiatry, psychotherapy, neoliberalism, transformation, reality.
It is addressed to the academic audience in the field of social sciences, cultural studies, or humanities, as well as anyone with an interest in the social factors shaping mental health and the cultural dimensions of capitalism. The book thus touches upon various aspects of cultural theory while keeping an ethnographic, empirical character. Examining depression’s history in Poland after 1989, the author not only considers the social conditions of clinical practice, but also explores a broader phenomenon of the cultural dynamic of realification (urealnienie) – the socially produced sense of realness of the world around us.
How do we account for the current proliferation of depression as a diagnostic and cultural category? How has its rise interplayed with the postsocialist transformation and the construction of the neoliberal order? This monograph of contemporary Polish depression sheds light on the social, political, and semantic processes that have shaped its meanings, ex- periences, understandings, and treatments.
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