December 2018 – Philosophy and Depression

The article this month is a quick pointer, via the work of the philosopher Matthew Ratcliffe, at a fundamental quality of depression that’s not easy to notice or describe. Basically, what he’s saying is that depression does in not so much change the things we see, but how we see them: depression makes not certain things seem meaningless, but rather makes impossible the seeing of anything as meaningful. This is not just arcane philosophy, or splitting hairs; if we don’t know this is going on, we will be looking everywhere for solutions, without realizing that the glasses we are wearing is coloring everything dark and dismal. The good news is that knowing that depression is making this existential sleight of hand allows you to question that “obviousness,” a critical opening for hope and faith that something actually is worthwhile about this life.

I hope your various holidays are going well so far, and as always, may you be getting enough support and enough challenge to keep healing and growing.

Philosophy and Depression

There’s a painful and distressing part of depression—amongst its many painful and distressing parts—being how difficult it is to pin down exactly what’s happening when depressed. It’s not for lack of intensity, certainly, or it being a new experience in human history (human recorded history seems to indicate depression has been with us since the beginning). Rather, it’s almost that something intrinsic to the phenomenon of depression itself that makes it hard to describe, to draw a circle around.

Matthew Ratcliffe, a British philosopher who focuses on depression (see his dense but remarkable book, Experiences of Depression), seeks to explain what’s going on with this “glaring mystery” of depression.

First, he says, we usually get the nature of depression wrong (including the field of psychology), confusing what happens with depression with what happens with common loss. The difference is that with common loss, we lose certain objects of hope, whereas with depression, we lose the capacity to hope. This might seem like a relatively small discrimination, but the effects of this insight are huge, both in understanding and treatment of depression.

Think of it this way: if you lose a particular job, your hope for continuing with that job will drop to zero. You’ll feel the loss, but as grief rather than depression. Grief is how our minds and hearts deal with having to let go of something we have been attached to, sort of analogous to a physical healing of a wound. But with this loss, it does not necessarily affect our belief and hope in good possibilities in other areas. “Yes, it feels awful to lose this job, but there will be others, and I know I’ll learn something from the experience.” Even though that particular possibility, of “advancement at my company,” becomes not-possible, it does not bring all possibilities down with it.

But with depression, that same job loss triggers something else, a systemic change in which not some thing is lost, but rather every thing is lost. As Ratcliffe describes, it’s not the contents of the world (say, this job) that changes, but the nature of the world itself. We cease being able to conceive of hope as real, because we have been switched into a world in which hopes (attachment to future possibility) become negated, because the felt-sense of the world—the visceral understanding of what’s real and true about this world—ceases to contain a sense of possibility.

Ratcliffe names this sense of the world our “existential feeling,” and when it alters, calls that “existential changes.” A key point here is that we are always creating in ourselves an existential feeling of the world, it’s just that unless there is a marked upset in that world, we don’t notice it. We just have a sense of how the world is; nothing is being created, I’m just experiencing the world as it shows up. It’s just kind of there.

But depression points out the falseness of that “just there” quality of the world, upending what we thought was obvious. We keep trying to think of depression within “just there” terms, but it is so qualitatively different than our normal states that in using the “just there” attempts to understand and communicate, we become befuzzled and confused. “It’s awful, but I don’t know how to explain it.”

The reason why Ratcliffe’s thinking is so important is that most therapies, and theories, of depression, try to understand depression as distortions in what we see, rather than in how we see. That is, depression is not something we experience, but how we experience.

Having this concept at hand, of the “existential feeling,” allows us another point of leverage, a place to put our philosophical crowbar under the concrete slab of “well, life just is awful.” We need such theories to allow us to doubt, from within the gunmetal-grey storm of depression, what depression tells us about life. Depression is the lived out theory, or philosophy, or anti-faith, that life and self are both dismal, without possibility. Such work as Ratcliffe’s is a boon because it spells out exactly why that is so wrong.