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Maybe good job and family isn't the only factors in leading a happy life? Not that I agree fully that brain chemistry isn't a factor. That said, the fact that

• eli_gottlieb 14y ago
  Speaking from both experience and anthropological theory, I would hypothesize that wealthier countries have more depression because they are more mobile. To start with the anthropological theory, let's take David Graeber's notion from Debt about the trauma of slavery. It's not merely being made to work by force that makes a slave. On a personal level, what traumatizes and dehumanizes a slave is that they have been ripped from their context. Everything that tied the free person to their family, their friends, their tribe/nation, their home, their religion, their culture, even their enemies, it has all been taken away. I think whenever you take someone entirely out of their context and put them in an entirely new context, there is a chance for depression, because I think that on a deep level, depression is a phenomenon of a person being out-of-context, or at least, out of any context that can physically and mentally nourish them in the right way.