Joshua Clark explores the impact of grammatical and idiomatic differences between English and French on the conceptualisation, experience, and treatment of depression.
Introduction
In 2017, the WHO made depression the focus of its year-long mental health campaign, “Depression, let’s talk,” indicating that: “[d]epression is the leading cause of ill health and disability worldwide” (WHO 2017). This recommendation to “talk” reflects a desire to counter “the continuing stigma associated with mental illness” (WHO 2017). The campaign’s messaging, like that of many public health institutions, adopts a disease-model framework, presenting depression as a biologically based medical illness, analogous to physical disease. In doing so, it positions depression as “a universally valid pathological entity requiring medical intervention” (Summerfield 2006, 162). While rates of depression diagnoses continue to rise (WHO 2025), however, it seems important to address the apparently univocal recommendation to talk about depression, and to linger on the following: How do we talk about depression?
Language, translation, and depression
Some of the challenges surrounding our understanding of depression as a cross-culturally applicable diagnostic category have led to important work in the field of cross-cultural psychiatry and medical anthropology. For example, Kleinman and Good (1985; 1987; 1993) have called into question the universality and translatability of depression across cultures. Their work shows particular interest in cultures and languages which do not feature equivalent words and concepts for depression, and a consideration of what Kleinman (1987, 451) terms “idioms of distress.” Our focus here is similarly concerned with certain idiomatic expressions of distress which resist translation.
The task of the translator, as Walter Benjamin has highlighted, involves lingering on that which resists translation in order to release the potential of language. It is in this way that one might “deepen and expand” one’s own language, “by means of the foreign language” (Benjamin 1970, 81). Citing Pannwitz’s (1921) reflections on the crisis of European culture, Benjamin argues that translators are mistaken when they seek to naturalise the foreign within their own linguistic framework. Instead, translation should allow the translator’s language to be unsettled and transformed by the foreign text. As such, meaning is not stabilised but set in motion as languages are transformed through their encounter with what exceeds their existing forms.
Extending this kind of insight into the medical humanities, Arnaldi and Forsdick (2023) argue that “translation is a way of thinking”: not merely the transfer of (fixed) meaning between languages, but “a philosophy and an epistemology based upon, and serving, an Other-oriented agenda.” This conception foregrounds relationality and linguistic hospitality, aligning with Wilson’s “Manifesto for a Multilingual Medical Humanities” (2023), and the call for “a more comprehensive encounter with the voices and perspectives of diverse global populations” (Wilson 2023). Rather than questioning universality by focusing on cultures or languages that lack an equivalent term for depression, this piece examines how grammar and idiom themselves shape meaning. Attending to these linguistic forms foregrounds the subtle but consequential ways in which depressive experience is conceptualised across languages.
On an unusual idiom
In the English language, depression is commonly referred to through the idiom of “having depression,” reflecting its status as a diagnosable medical condition in two key diagnostic manuals: the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (APA 2022) and the International Classification of Diseases (WHO 2022). In both manuals, depression is defined through a bounded set of diagnostic criteria, standardising how the condition is identified and treated. The everyday idiom of “having” thus signals towards a broader medical framework in which depression is understood as something one possesses, just as one receives and possesses a clinical diagnosis.
Equally, the possessive construction registers an understanding of mental and physical illness as broadly equivalent: one has depression in the same way as one has heart disease. In public health campaigning, this equivalence is articulated through the notion of “parity of esteem,” which seeks to destigmatise mental illness by promoting equal recognition of mental and physical health. Such discourse frequently frames depression in terms analogous to visible physical illness and disability, reinforcing the idiom of possession and framing depression as a discrete disease entity. In this vein, in order to signal that it is a serious condition requiring medical care, it has become something of a trope in popular discourse to compare depression to having a broken leg (Smith 2015; Parkinson 2018). Despite the well-meaning intentions of campaigns that seek to counter stigma and promote the parity of esteem, this mode of comparison runs the risk of a false equivalence that holds problematic conceptual consequences.
What this equivalent framing of physical and mental illness also engages in, according to Szasz (1960), is a certain type of mythmaking. Regarding the claim that, “mental illness is just as ‘real’ and ‘objective’ as bodily illness,” he has suggested that this “create[s] the idea in the popular mind that mental illness is some sort of disease entity, like an infection or a malignancy. […] [O]ne might have or harbor it, one might transmit it to others, and finally one could get rid of it.” (Szasz 1960, 166). I draw attention to this quotation for its focus on the linguistic and rhetorical production of meaning; here, Szasz gives us pause to consider how mental illness and pathology have been culturally conceptualised and encoded through medical language. What he calls the “unusual idiom” of having mental illness (Szasz 1960, 116) helps to promote a concept of depression as a disease entity.
The significance of this having should not be understated in the context of mental ill-health. As Beeman (1985, 221) has pointed out: “[t]he ability to speak about disorder is also a function of the curing process. Thus, when individuals in any culture seek to be cured of distress, emotional or otherwise, their idiom for speaking about that distress is related to the context of curing.” If idioms of distress are shaped by the context of cure, as Beeman suggests, then the latter part of Szasz’s (1960) critique becomes especially significant: the grammatical construction of “having depression” appears to imply that treating or curing it – understood as relieving suffering – entails getting rid of it. The semantic pairing of “having” and “getting rid of” is therefore highly significant, casting depression as an eliminable disease-object and treatment as the removal of the symptoms that testify to its presence.
While the “having” construction aligns with the brain-disease models, this has often been viewed as a means of reducing blame. Framing depression as a disease entity that one has aims to detach the condition from character and identity, affording a sense of distance and the possibility of change – the prospect of not always having it. This, in line with efforts to destigmatise depression, is seen as the advantage of disease-model explanations. However, citing research from Mehta and Farina (1997), Corrigan and Watson (2004) have noted that while “disease explanations for mental illness reduced blame,” they also “provoked harsher behavior towards an individual with mental illness.” Equally, as Moncrieff (2025, 212) demonstrates, campaigns promoting depression as a biological condition – as a flaw in chemistry, not character – can paradoxically increase stigma, portraying individuals as inherently ill or unlikely to recover. While an individual certainly cannot be blamed for having a chemical imbalance, it seems that having slides almost imperceptibly towards being, in the very sense that, as Vidal and Ortega (2017) have demonstrated, we have come to understand ourselves essentially as our brains.
Being/doing depression
Whereas English predominantly frames depression through the idiom of possession, French employs a markedly different set of grammatical constructions. Although “depression” (dépression in French) is a cognate nominalised from the Latin verb deprimere [to press down], everyday usage diverges significantly across the two languages. In French, clinical depression is more commonly signalled through expressions such as être dépressif/dépressive [to be depressive] or faire une dépression [to do/make a depression], rather than through a possessive construction. Here, we will focus on the former, where, interestingly, there is a change both in verb (from “having” to “being”), as well as a move from noun (“depression”) to adjective (dépressif). Notably, despite shared etymologies in deprimere, French is also able to distinguish lexically between dépressif, which signals clinical depression, and déprimé, which denotes normative or non-clinical depression. English, by contrast, lacks an equivalent adjectival distinction, relying instead solely on context to differentiate between clinical and non-clinical uses of “depressed.”
Syntactically and semantically, then, the adjective dépressif describes a mode of being, situating depression as a state in which the subject finds themselves, rather than an object they can be said to possess. To foreground depression specifically in terms of being, in this way, emphasises subjective experience: rather than seeing depression as a discrete pathological entity, we are given reason, in the construction être dépressif/dépressive, to speak of depression as an experience – “a meaningful, emotional response to life” (Moncrieff 2025, 40). However, this framing of depression as a mode of being also carries certain risks: it may, for example, fix depression as an identity-marker and thus intensify the possibilities of social and self-stigma that continue to surround mental illness diagnoses.
Cure, subjectivity, and the having mode
Erich Fromm for PIFAL. CC BY 2.0.
The contrast between English and French can be further clarified through Erich Fromm’s distinction between the being and having modes of existence. In To Have or to Be? (1976), Fromm characterises the having mode as one in which “there is no alive relationship between me and what I have” and in which “the relationship is one of deadness, not aliveness” (Fromm 1976, 63–64). This mode of relating, he argues, extends to health and illness, noting that “by saying ‘I have a problem’ instead of ‘I am troubled,’ subjective experience is eliminated: the I of experience is replaced by the it of possession” (Fromm 1976, 18). When applied to the idiom of “having depression,” this formulation casts depression as an object to be possessed and eliminated, rather than as an experience that unfolds in relation to the subject. The grammatical framing of depression as something one “has” thus participates in a broader process of objectification, in which both subject and experience, for Fromm, are rendered static.
By contrast, grammatical constructions that frame depression as a mode of being or becoming (such as être dépressif) foreground a more dynamic and experiential relation to depression. Although these constructions do not in themselves escape medicalisation or the risk of identity fixation, they nonetheless resist the “deadness” that Fromm (1976, 64) associates with the having mode by retaining the subject within the experience of distress. In this respect, these linguistic differences resonate with Beeman’s (1985) observation, suggesting that the idioms available for articulating depression shape how it is understood, and also how it may be addressed and lived through. Moreover, having acknowledged the complex implications of these linguistic framings, we can see that neither the “having” nor the “being” mode is inherently unproblematic.
Conclusion
The contrast between English and French idioms for depression demonstrates how linguistic form actively shapes the conceptualisation and lived apprehension of depressive experiences. English’s possessive construction aligns with Fromm’s (1976) “having mode,” in which experience is objectified, and the subject is alienated from what is possessed. By contrast, French constructions, such as être dépressif, foreground depression as a lived state, retaining the linguistic subject within the experience and enabling a relational articulation of distress. These differences highlight that language does not simply describe or name suffering, rather it shapes the possibilities for understanding and responding to it.
As Whorf (1956, 42) reminds us: “Meaning will be found to be intimately connected with the linguistic: its principle is symbolism but language is the great symbolism from which other symbolisms take their cue.” From this perspective, language functions as a constitutive framework through which experience itself is rendered intelligible, as opposed to a neutral vehicle for transmitting pre-existing meanings. For this reason, as Kleinman and Good (1985, 3) emphasise, the translation of emotional terms cannot be reduced to semantic equivalence alone but instead entails engagement with “different ways of being a person in radically different worlds.” Attending closely to linguistic modes of speaking about depression not only complicates claims to diagnostic universality, but also opens up alternative ways of articulating, inhabiting, and responding to depressive suffering, foregrounding language as a productive and ethically consequential dimension of experience and care.
About the author
Joshua Clark is a second-year comparative literature PhD student at UCL, working in the School of European Languages, Culture and Society – Centre for Multidisciplinary and Intercultural Inquiry (SELCS-CMII). His research focuses on the representation of depression in contemporary English, French, and German film and literature. He holds a BA in French and German from UCL, as well as an MA in French and Francophone Studies from UCL. He is particularly interested in how art, in a broad sense, can contribute to interdisciplinary discussions of mental (ill-)health.
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