Skip to main content

Experiences of Depression: A Study in Phenomenology

Experiences of Depression
 by Matthew Ratcliffe
In this post, Matthew Ratcliffe, Professor of Philosophy at Durham University, presents his new book, Experiences of Depression. From 1st April 2015, Matthew will be Professor for Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Vienna, Austria.


My new book, Experiences of Depression: A Study in Phenomenology (Oxford University Press, 2015), is part of a wider-ranging, longer-term research project on the phenomenology of feeling in psychiatric illness.

The book is a philosophical exploration of what it is like to be depressed. I start from the observation that many people struggle to describe their experiences of depression. It is often remarked that depression is like being in a ‘different world’, an isolated, suffocating, alien realm that is difficult or impossible to convey to others. By drawing on work in phenomenology, philosophy of mind and several other disciplines, I offer a detailed account of what such experiences consist of, which focuses on themes such as bodily feeling, emotion, narrative, belief, agency, temporal experience and interpersonal relations.

A consistent theme throughout the book is the experience of possibility. I argue that all of our experiences and thoughts are imbued with a sense of the possible, and that the ‘world of depression’ can be understood in terms of the kinds of possibility that a person is able to experience and contemplate. Although I emphasise the heterogeneity of depression, I maintain that the vast majority of experiences associated with diagnoses such as ‘major depressive disorder’ involve the loss, diminution or increased salience of certain kinds of possibility. Various seemingly disparate symptoms, such as bodily feelings, characteristic beliefs, alterations in the sense of time, and an inability to connect with other people are to be construed as inextricable aspects of a unitary shift in one’s sense of the possible. The practical significance of things is usually diminished; they no longer offer up the usual possibilities for activity.

Along with with this, there may be a sense of impossibility. For example, other people might continue to offer possibilities for communion but these possibilities present themselves as ‘impossible for me to take up’. Estrangement from other people and from the world in general amounts to a change in the sense of reality and belonging - things no longer appear available; they are strangely distant, not quite ‘there’ anymore. Certain kinds of possibility may also be heightened. A world that ceases to offer the invitation to act can at the same time take the form of an all-enveloping threat, before which one is passive, helpless and alone. Hope, practical significance and interpersonal connection are not just gone. Their loss is very much part of the experience; it is felt. And I offer an account of how our sense of the possible is, at the same time, a kind of bodily feeling.

Hence the book demonstrates how phenomenological research can contribute to psychiatry, by facilitating a better understanding of patients’ experiences and, in so doing, informing classification, diagnosis and treatment. In addition, I show how the study of depression experiences can contribute to philosophical debates concerning a wide range of topics, including the structure of intersubjectivity, the nature of empathy, our sense of free will, temporal experience, the ingredients of emotion and feeling, what it is to believe something, and what it is to hope. The book also describes and puts into practice a method for doing phenomenological research. I maintain that we can make phenomenological discoveries, of a kind that have broader applicability, by engaging with experiences of depression. From the perspective of the phenomenologist, this book is not so much a study of depression as a wider-ranging analysis of the changeable space of possibilities that we inhabit.

Popular posts from this blog

Delusions in the DSM 5

This post is by Lisa Bortolotti. How has the definition of delusions changed in the DSM 5? Here are some first impressions. In the DSM-IV (Glossary) delusions were defined as follows: Delusion. A false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everyone else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary. The belief is not one ordinarily accepted by other members of the person's culture or subculture (e.g., it is not an article of religious faith). When a false belief involves a value judgment, it is regarded as a delusion only when the judgment is so extreme as to defy credibility.

Rationalization: Why your intelligence, vigilance and expertise probably don't protect you

Today's post is by Jonathan Ellis , Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Public Philosophy at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Eric Schwitzgebel , Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. This is the first in a two-part contribution on their paper "Rationalization in Moral and Philosophical thought" in Moral Inferences , eds. J. F. Bonnefon and B. Trémolière (Psychology Press, 2017). We’ve all been there. You’re arguing with someone – about politics, or a policy at work, or about whose turn it is to do the dishes – and they keep finding all kinds of self-serving justifications for their view. When one of their arguments is defeated, rather than rethinking their position they just leap to another argument, then maybe another. They’re rationalizing –coming up with convenient defenses for what they want to believe, rather than responding even-handedly to the points you're making. Yo

A co-citation analysis of cross-disciplinarity in the empirically-informed philosophy of mind

Today's post is by  Karen Yan (National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University) on her recent paper (co-authored with Chuan-Ya Liao), " A co-citation analysis of cross-disciplinarity in the empirically-informed philosophy of mind " ( Synthese 2023). Karen Yan What drives us to write this paper is our curiosity about what it means when philosophers of mind claim their works are informed by empirical evidence and how to assess this quality of empirically-informedness. Building on Knobe’s (2015) quantitative metaphilosophical analyses of empirically-informed philosophy of mind (EIPM), we investigated further how empirically-informed philosophers rely on empirical research and what metaphilosophical lessons to draw from our empirical results.  We utilize scientometric tools and categorization analysis to provide an empirically reliable description of EIPM. Our methodological novelty lies in integrating the co-citation analysis tool with the conceptual resources from the philosoph