DOI: https://doi.org/10.36347/sasjm.2026.v12i05.026

Pages: 503-512

For older adults, depression, a major issue in gerontological practice and public health today, constitutes a subjective suffering that does not always present in its "classic" form (sadness, crying, guilt, suicidal thoughts). It expresses itself differently from depressive pseudo-dementia, which is an objectively observable deficit that is most often trivialized, but with which it can coexist. It is often atypical, or rather masked, split between latent depressive affect and visible symptomatic expression, which makes diagnosis more difficult for clinical psychology, insofar as classic depressive syndromes are either not expressed or are expressed differently or insufficiently. What could be the reasons why? Is this due to a pathological rather than a defensive or integrative reorganization of the bodily self - that is, to the subjective transformation of existence and the reconfiguration of bodily and psychic experience following the involution associated with aging, as found in the works of Freud, Schilder, Lacan, Dolto, and Anzieu, who present the body both as the support of the subject's psychic identity and as the seat of their narcissistic foundations? Is it due to psychic defence mechanisms such as denial and somatization? Is it due to sociocultural norms that value the restraint or concealment of emotions in older adults, or to various comorbidities? The clinical psychopathological model adopted in our research (the geriatric depressive masking model) is holistic or synthetic: it unifies the bodily self, narcissism and the cultural anchoring of the subject, taking into account - a) - the damage to the aging bodily self, - b) - the narcissistic wounds arising from the experience of this aging, with the symbolization or not of the suffering, and - c) - the sociocultural mediation of the expression of this suffering. The main hypothesis of our work is thus formulated as follows: in the elderly African subject (Cameroonian in particular), depression can be mas