Major depression in Cyprus amid financial crisis: prevalence and correlates

Community indicators for mental health in Europe: a scoping review

Background

Community indicators may predict and influence individuals` mental health, and support or impede mental health management. However, there is no consensus on which indicators should be included in predictions, prognostic algorithms, or management strategies for community-based mental health promotion and prevention approaches. Therefore, this scoping review provides an overview of relevant community-level indicators for mental health in the general as well as risk populations in a European context.

Methods

We conducted a scoping review in the following electronic databases: PubMed, Embase, and PsycInfo. Eligible studies focused on context factors such as either the physical or social environment, reporting at least one mental health outcome and referring to a European population. Publications between 2012 and March 8, 2022 are considered.

Results

In total, the search yielded 12,200 identified records. After the removal of duplicates, 10,059 records were screened against the eligibility criteria. In total, 169 studies were included in the final analysis. Out of these included studies, 6% focused on pan-European datasets and 94% on a specific European country. Populations were either general or high-risk populations (56 vs. 44%, respectively) with depressive disorder as the main reported outcome (49%), followed by general mental health (33%) and anxiety (23%). Study designs were cross-sectional studies (59%), longitudinal (27%), and others (14%). The final set of indicators consisted of 53 indicators, which were grouped conceptually into 13 superordinate categories of community indicators. These were divided into the domains of the physical and social environment. The most commonly measured and reported categories of community indicators associated with mental health outcomes were social networks (n = 87), attitudinal factors toward vulnerable groups (n = 76), and the characteristics of the built environment (n = 56).

Conclusion

This review provides an evidence base of existing and novel community-level indicators that are associated with mental health. Community factors related to the physical and social environment should be routinely recorded and considered as influencing factors or potentially underestimated confounders. The relevance should be analyzed and included in clinical outcomes, data, monitoring and surveillance as they may reveal new trends and targets for public mental health interventions.

Between medicalisation and normalisation: Antithetical representations of depression in the Greek-Cypriot press in times of financial crisis

Media offer people ways of understanding mental health and illness, shaping their attitudes and behaviour towards it. Yet, the literature on media representations of depression is limited and fails to illuminate sufficiently the content of representations. In times of financial crisis, the prevalence of depression is increased and the particular meanings associated with depression are widely diffused. To unpack these meanings, we focused on the Greek-Cypriot press during the financial crisis of 2013. Two-hundred and three articles from seven widely circulating newspapers were thematically analysed. Two antithetical themes of representations of depression were identified: Biomedical Depression, which constructed depression as a biologically grounded illness treated through medical/pharmaceutical means, and Everyday Depression, which portrayed depression as something normal, encountered in anyone, attributed to psychosocial factors (e.g. the financial crisis), and treated through self-management. Biomedical Depression reflects a widespread medical and deterministic understanding of depression. Nevertheless, this understanding has not overridden, as the literature suggests, references to individual agency, which are present in the Everyday Depression and the more normalising understanding of depression it expresses. We argue, however, that both themes promote an individualistic understanding of depression, placing individuals in a tense position of being responsible for a condition perceived to be outside their control.