[Depression, culture and evil]

The author has written this article as a reflexion on the relation between depression and guilt feelings by comparing her clinical experience-acquired in a western context-to knowledge gained from psychiatric anthropology studies. Manifestations of suffering are different according to different cultural contexts; in the western world the idea of guilt is prevalent, whereas it is somatic troubles and the idea of persecution that are in the foreground in non-western cultures, more particularly in Black Africa and the Maghreb. In the western world melancholy is not only a genuine standard model of depression but is also a cultural fact as witnessed by the numerous references in the literary and pictorial fields. The author asks us to ponder relations between the strength and frequency of guilt feelings on the one hand and the question of the debt and interiority of evil (sin) in the western christian tradition.