Loneliness is a near-universal experience. It is particularly common for individuals with (so-called) psychopathological conditions or disorders. In this paper, we explore the experiential character of loneliness, with a specific emphasis on how social goods are experienced as absent in ways that involve a diminished sense of agency and recognition. We explore the role and experience of loneliness in three case studies: depression, anorexia nervosa, and autism. We demonstrate that even though experiences of loneliness might be common to many psychopathologies, (...) these experiences nevertheless have distinctive profiles. Specifically, we suggest that: (i) loneliness is often a core characteristic of depressive experience; (ii) loneliness can drive, and even cement, disordered eating practices and anorectic identity in anorexia nervosa; iii) loneliness is neither a core characteristic of autism nor a driver but is rather commonly experienced as stemming from social worlds, environments, and norms that fail to accommodate autistic bodies and their distinctive forms of life. We aim to do justice to the pervasiveness of loneliness in many — if not all — psychopathologies, while also highlighting the need to attend to psychopathology-specific experiences of loneliness, agency, and (non-)recognition. (shrink)

We introduce two concepts—social certainty and social doubt—that help to articulate a variety of experiences of the social world, such as shyness, self-consciousness, culture shock, and anxiety. Following Carel's (2013) analysis of bodily doubt, which explores how a person's tacit confidence in the workings of their body can be disrupted and undermined in illness, we consider how an individual's faith in themselves as a social agent, too, can be compromised or lost, thus altering their experience of what is afforded by (...) the social environment. We highlight how a loss of bodily or social certainty can be shaped and sustained by the environments in which one finds oneself. As such, we show how certain individuals might be more vulnerable to experiences of bodily and social doubt than others. (shrink)

BackgroundCommonly applied measures of symptoms of anxiety are not sensitive to disease-specific anxiety in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. There is a need for validated instruments measuring COPD-specific anxiety. Therefore, we translated the COPD-Anxiety Questionnaire into Danish and performed an initial validation of the psychometric properties in a sample of patients with COPD.Materials and MethodsTranslation procedures followed the World Health Organization guidelines. Participants with COPD completed questionnaires measuring COPD-specific anxiety, general psychological distress as well as variables related to COPD, (...) quality of life, and socio-demography.ResultsA total of 260 patients with COPD completed questionnaires. The Danish version of CAF-R-DK demonstrated acceptable Cronbach’s α values that were comparable with those of the original CAF. As expected, the CAF-R-DK showed positive correlations with convergent constructs and negative correlations with discriminant constructs. However, the results for specific subdomains of the CAF-R-DK indicated inconsistency in the underlying concept of disease-specific anxiety, which was also suggested based on the subsequent confirmatory and exploratory factor analyzes.ConclusionThe CAF could serve as an important supplement to generic psychological distress screening of patients with COPD in somatic health care settings, and the questionnaire is now available in Danish. Translation into other languages is needed with the purpose of obtaining data for further testing the psychometric properties of the questionnaire. (shrink)

Depression is an affective disorder involving a significant change in an individual’s emotional and affective experiences. While the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition mentions that social impairment may occur in depression, first-person reports of depression consistently name isolation from others as a key feature of depression. I present a phenomenological analysis of how certain interpersonal relations are experienced in depression. In particular, I consider whether depressed individuals are able to enter into “we-experiences” with other people. We-experiences (...) are experiences had with two or more people as a we, experiences that allow one to enter into robustly shared experiences with others. I claim that the ability to enter into we-experiences is eroded in depression due to an overwhelming feeling of being different to and misunderstood by others. As such, I suggest that depression should be conceived of as fixing an individual in their first-person singular perspective, thus inhibiting their ability to experience in the first-person plural and to feel a sense of connectedness or togetherness with others as part of a we. By attending to on-going impacts of a diminished ability to enter into we-experiences, we can provide a situated and more nuanced account of the changes of interpersonal relations in depression that captures the progressive nature of the disorder. In turn, this analysis furthers our understanding of the emergence, frustration, and erosion of actual and habitual we-experiences. (shrink)