According to DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.'s citation of Dr. Ronald C. Kessler in the New York Times' Large Study on Mental Illness Finds Global Prevalence:"In China, for instance, no word distinguishes depression from sadness". Someone's got it wrong. In both China and Taiwan, the word for depression is youyuzheng 忧郁症 (憂鬱症; don't you love those 繁體字?). In fact, unlike its English equivalent, the final "zheng" indicates that this is a disease; one could argue that in English, to the layperson "depression" is not so obviously a disease.

Otherwise, the study--based on face-to-face interviews--shows the prevalence of mental illness in urban China as being exceedingly low; around 1%; in the US it's 7.7%, far more than other developed countries. So either Americans are crazy, or we're more willing to admit it, or one could say, blame it for our problems.

Of course the WHO doesn't include Taiwan. Maybe they're all nuts here.