READ: Study: Depression among PH youth doubles in 8 years

There is no question that clinical language can be useful. Naming depression can open pathways to care, treatment, validation, and public recognition. Many people have found relief in finally encountering a term that helps them understand what they are going through. Yet the question is not whether diagnosis is helpful, but what happens when diagnosis becomes the dominant language through which suffering must pass in order to count. When kalungkutan becomes depression, something is gained, but something is also reordered. A culturally textured, locally intelligible experience is converted into a category with greater institutional portability. It becomes easier for schools, clinics, media systems, workplaces, and even social networks to recognize and process. But that very ease may flatten meanings that were once more complex, relational, and socially grounded.

A Filipinizing perspective on mental health helps clarify this tension. The intellectual tradition of Sikolohiyang Pilipino, associated most prominently with Virgilio G. Enriquez, reminds us that psychological concepts cannot simply be imported whole and assumed to operate identically across contexts. Human experience is mediated by language, history, values, and culture. In the Philippine setting, where suffering is often interpreted through social obligation, endurance, family relations, and moral expectations, emotional distress does not always arrive in the same terms as those privileged by Western psychiatric discourse. To collapse Filipino expressions of pain too quickly into the language of depression risks erasing local ways of knowing and narrating distress. It is not merely a translation problem; it is an epistemological one.

This is where information privilege deepens into a politics of recognition. Those with greater access to education, English-language discourse, psychiatric services, online mental health content, and therapeutic vocabulary are more likely to narrate their experiences in institutionally legible ways. They can say “I have depression,” and that statement is more readily understood by systems already structured to respond to it. It can be documented, categorized, measured, and treated. It can circulate through awareness campaigns, intake forms, diagnosis, policy, and media discourse. Others, however, may suffer no less intensely and still remain less audible because they lack access to that same legitimized vocabulary. A person who says mabigat ang loob ko (my emotions feel heavy) may be heard as simply sad, overly emotional, spiritually weak, or insufficiently resilient. The inequality, then, is not only about access to healthcare. It is also about access to social legibility.

The insight resonates with Michel Foucault’s account in The Birth of the Clinic, where he shows that institutions do not simply discover illness as a neutral object waiting to be described. They also create the conditions under which certain forms of suffering become visible, intelligible, and sayable. What counts as a valid symptom or recognizable condition depends on historically specific regimes of knowledge. Ian Hacking extends this concern in Historical Ontology, where he examines how classifications do not merely describe people from the outside but also shape how people come to understand themselves. Categories become socially active. They recognize perception, conduct, and identity. In this light, depression is not only a medical term. It is also a historically powerful discourse through which persons can be made knowable to themselves and to institutions.

That process becomes even more complicated once public discourse begins encouraging people to speak openly about their suffering. Openness can be liberating, especially in contexts where silence has long been enforced by shame or stigma. But as Foucault suggests in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, speech is not always the opposite of power; often it is one of power’s most effective instruments. To talk about depression is not simply to reveal an inner truth that was already there in pure form. It is also to enter a field of classification, visibility, and regulation. Language can make suffering speakable, but it can also make it governable. Once depression becomes the most authoritative vocabulary of distress, other ways of naming pain may be rendered secondary, vague, unscientific, or insufficiently serious.

This has serious implications for scholarly communication. Academic systems tend to privilege what is citable, archived, standardized, and methodologically recognizable. Clinical terminology, policy language, expert testimony, and institutional categories travel more easily through journals, conferences, databases, and classrooms because they fit existing structures of legitimacy. By contrast, everyday speech, vernacular concepts, oral narratives, and culturally specific modes of expression are harder to stabilize within scholarly form. They are less likely to be indexed, cited, or treated as theory-bearing. The result is a subtle hierarchy in which certain forms of suffering are more publishable than others. Scholarship may therefore reproduce the very inequalities it seeks to expose if it listens only to what institutions already know how to hear.

The stakes for scholarly communication are concrete. If academic systems continue to privilege only what is easily indexed, standardized, and translated into dominant expert vocabularies, then they will keep reproducing epistemic inequality even while claiming to expand access. A more equitable scholarly communication culture must therefore do more than remove paywalls. Researchers need to design studies that listen carefully to vernacular ways of naming distress before converting them into institutional categories. In research, editors and peer reviewers need to remain open to forms of evidence, framing, and terminology that emerge from local lifeworlds rather than treating them as imprecise versions of already dominant concepts. Meanwhile, teachers can help students see that language is never a neutral vehicle of knowledge: it shapes what becomes visible, credible, and worth citing in the first place.

When kalungkutan becomes depression, more than vocabulary changes. The conditions of recognition change with it. Some forms of suffering travel easily through journals, clinics, classrooms, and public discourse because they are already expressed in institutionally legible terms, while others remain unheard, not because they are less real, but because they are less authorized. Taking information privilege seriously means recognizing that the politics of scholarly communication also includes the politics of translation, interpretation, and voice. The constructive task, then, is not to reject clinical language, but to build knowledge practices capacious enough to hear suffering in more than one register. In doing so, scholarly communication can move closer to a richer kind of openness—one that expands not only access to information, but also the range of human experience that is allowed to count as knowledge.

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