For the Inuit, depression is so minor in the scale of things and so evident a part of everyone’s life that, except in severe cases of vegetative illness, they simply ignore it. Between their silence and our intensely verbalized self-awareness lie a multitude of ways of speaking of psychic pain, of knowing that pain. Context, race, gender, tradition, nation—all conspire to determine what is to be said and what is to be left unsaid—and to some extent they thereby determine what is to be alleviated, what exacerbated, what endured, what forsworn. The depression—its urgency, its symptoms, and the
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