Globalization helps people feel at home at any corner of the world. This is, however, illusionary. The illusion of commonness does not take into consideration cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Being at home everywhere may easily become being at home nowhere and being homeless is deeply distressful.

The COVID-19 pandemic imposed heavy restrictions in relationships and caused long-term isolation. Reports coming from various countries indicate rising rates of depressive disorders among the many consequences of the pandemic. The positive notion is the increasing openness in communicating mood disorders on individual, society and country levels. The latest report on loneliness in the United States showed that 36% of Americans feel lonely frequently or almost all the time. Even more alarming figures describe young generations: 61% of young adults and 50% of mothers with young children feel very lonely. This, for sure, does not go along with the image of a smiling American responding “fine, wonderful” to a usual question “How are you?” - a campaign for mental health launched by the American Society on Aging calls for action to start talking about mental health.

The World Happiness Report 2021 published by World Population Review indicates that Finland has been the happiest country for the last five years in a row. How is this possible, if the suicide rates in Finland are well above the average for Europe (data for 2019 - Finland: 15.3 per 100 000, Europe: 12,93 per 100 000)? Clearly, there is some incoherence between the survey, the statistics as well as the language and its interpretation.

More and more celebrities admit that they had depressive episodes and share their stories with millions of anonymous users of the Internet. Whatever one thinks about this type of communication, such actions familiarize society with mood disorders and lift some of the stigma related to mental health problems. Open communication about depression may be more accessible to younger generations as older adults less frequently use social media or virtual networks. It is one of the many complex reasons why late life depression is underdiagnosed and depressive symptoms are sometimes wrongly perceived as a part of normal aging.

Sex-differences in the symptomatology of mood disorders including somatic symptoms and signs of depression may be related to cultural heritage and perception of the role of women and men in the family and society. Level of education influences the way of describing emotions, psychological status and neuropsychiatric symptoms accompanying depression. Culturally determined factors may influence the acceptability of various methods of therapy, e.g. art-therapy is more efficient as complementary treatment of depression in women than men.

The set of words describing emotions may share the same concepts in different languages, e.g. words for sadness or low mood, however specific shades of emotions may be easily blurred by translation. The simple example comes from popular music: deeply emotional lyrics in English, French or Italian often become silly or even ridiculous in other, less “romantic” languages. The same may happen to diagnostic instruments i.e. clinical scales or inventories for the assessment of depressive disorders. Translation and linguistic validation do not warrant intercultural understanding and psychometric properties. Therefore, it is extremely time consuming to develop fully reliable instruments for scientific research.

We invite clinicians and researchers from different parts of the world to share their views and communicate results on factors influencing the perception of depression across the lifespan, in different cultural backgrounds and linguistic identities. Types of articles anticipated within the Research Topic include:
• Original Research
• Systematic Review, Review or Policy and Practice Review
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Perspective
• Clinical Trial
• Case Report and Community Case Study
• Conceptual analysis
• Curriculum Instruction and Pedagogy
• Opinion
• Study protocol

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Frontiers in Psychology

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