Capitalism and depression in colombia: A study on the experiences of depression in company employees

This doctoral research examines the relationship between contemporary capitalism and depression from a sociological, phenomenological, and anticolonial perspective. Confronting the biomedical hegemony that medicalizes psychic suffering and promotes decontextualized pharmacological solutions, the study offers a critique of dominant psychiatric discourse and its ties to neoliberal logic. Using the Colombian case as a reference, it argues that depression cannot be understood outside the historical framework of colonialism, economic dependency, and the production of market-oriented subjectivities. The research draws on phenomenology as a tool to recover the lived experience of suffering and to challenge the universal models imposed by Western science. The aim is not to define depression, but to understand how it is experienced in a specific sociocultural context, taking into account its political, historical, and symbolic dimensions. Through a qualitative approach based on semi-structured interviews, testimonies were collected from individuals who identify as depressed, seeking to restore their voices within academic discourse. A phenomenological analysis of these interviews revealed key themes such as labor precariousness, organizational depersonalization, loss of personal time, and oppressive power dynamics. The research concludes that depression, far from being an isolated individual pathology, is a structural manifestation of the distress produced by globalized capitalism in contexts marked by inequality and ongoing colonial domination.