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Some of these figures might simply reflect more willingness to label an experience as a symptom.

In her book “Depression in Japan,” the anthropologist Junko Kitanaka writes that partly as a result of aggressive pharmaceutical marketing, many Japanese began to think of their fatigue and suicidal thoughts as symptoms created by a disease.

he number of diagnoses of depression in that country more than doubled between 1999 and 2008.

In 2011, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that the rate of antidepressant use in the United States rose by 400 percent between 1988 and 2008.

What has exploded in India over the past few decades, but also everywhere else in the world, is information about other people. As we watch television, surf the Internet and follow events around the world, we become intimately aware of other ways of living and of others who are richer and more powerful. We place ourselves in a vast social order in which most of us are ants. It may truly be a depressing reflection.

In a city you are more likely to be depressed, to fall ill with schizophrenia, and to use alcohol and drugs. Poverty and rapid urbanization sharpen these effects.

Something Dr. Thara said made me wonder about another factor: “Gadgets. All these gadgets. Nobody thinks for themselves anymore.”

We have recently learned that Facebook leads people to feel less good in the moment and less satisfied with their lives. (Some 85 million Indians use Facebook, most of them at least in part through their phones.)

“Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other,”

By 2010, for the first time in history, more than half the world’s population lived in cities

By 2010, for the first time in history, more than half the world’s population lived in cities. Cities are places of possibility: They are, as E. B. White said of New York, “the visible symbol of aspiration and faith, the white plume saying that the way is up.” But cities also break traditions and fracture families, and they breed psychiatric illness. In a city you are more likely to be depressed, to fall ill with schizophrenia, and to use alcohol and drugs. Poverty and rapid urbanization sharpen these effects.