1: http://www.amazon.com/Crazy-Like-Us-Globalization-American/d...
But...
My thinking about mental illness changed a lot after reading a book called Crazy Like Us [1]. It doesn't talk about depression specifically - it's a collection of case studies on how different mental illnesses have been experienced/handled/treated by different societies around the world, and how western understandings of mental illness have generally displaced existing cultural understandings, not always for the better.
The major argument of the book is that the Western view of conditions such as depression as 'mental illness' has been counter-productive to attempts to de-stigmatize such conditions. The author also makes a convincing argument that it's also made recovery less likely for a lot of sufferers.
And to me that makes a lot of sense. Many other cultures view emotional suffering as a normal part of human life. In the West we view it as an unnatural state. We think that by detaching the condition from the sufferer, we're de-stigmatizing it, but the sufferer ends up more stigmatized because... now they are considered mentally ill. And they have less hope of their situation improving, because we're telling them that there is something biologically wrong with them.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Crazy-Like-Us-Globalization-American/d...
Here's a book that adds to this point that mental illness "spreads" in a social contagion sense: https://www.amazon.com/Crazy-Like-Us-Globalization-American/...