There has been recent work on acedia and its relationship to depression, but the results are a mixed bag. In this essay, I engage some recent scholarship comparing acedia with depression, endeavouring to clarify the concept of acedia using literature from theology, philosophy, psychiatry, and even a 16th-century treatise on witchcraft. Along the way, I will show the following key theses. First, the concept of acedia is not identical to the concept of depression. Acedia is not merely a primitive psychological (...) predecessor to depression, but it marks off significantly different ways of being, not least because of one’s spiritual relation to God. As Lucrèce Luciani-Zidane (2009: 13) has said, “acedia is entangled in the heart (or life) of Christian dogma.” Second, however, it is still possible that an instance of acedia can coincide with an instance of depression, if one’s condition, or state, is such that each term can be correctly and truthfully applied. By the conclusion of this piece, I begin to explore what practical implications this view has for practitioners and laypersons. (shrink)

This dissertation in Theory of Practical Knowledge contends that depression is a disorder of the self. Using the existential-phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I argue that if we want to disclose the basic structure of depressed experience, then we must likewise disclose how selfexperience is inseparable from depressed experience. However, even though depression is a contemporary psychiatric category of illness, it is nevertheless a historically and heterogenous concept. To make sense of depression in the context of contemporary psychiatric practice, I show (...) that depression has historically been characterized by two broad models of causation; that is, a phenomenon that is causally explained by either a biological dysfunction or a psychological conflict. But this stark characterization is not limited just to history; by conducting qualitative interviews with psychiatric professionals, I illustrate how this causal dichotomy remains prevalent in contemporary psychiatric practice. On one hand, the clinicians report dissatisfaction with the depression diagnostic criteria (i.e. it is impersonal or vague), while on the other hand, the clinicians also recognize that a depression diagnosis is useful insofar as a diagnosis facilitates access to various resources associated with psychiatric care. Consequently, clinicians have developed a coping strategy that is witnessed in their empathetic desire to distance patients from their depression diagnosis, which led to statements such as, “you are not the problem, the problem is depression.” One consequence of this approach is that depression is artificially cleaved from the person who experiences depression, which subsequently means that depression is viewed to be something independent of oneself. Because I argue that depression and the self are mutually implicated, it is crucial to disseminate some of the most influential contemporary models of selfhood. I show that the brainbound, situated, psychological, and narrative model of self, all have respective strengths and weaknesses. But I also go beyond these models and characterize selfhood as a developmental phenomenon that is expressed as an embodied-style. This style reflects the way in which we establish perceptual contact with the otherness, without which there could be no self-experience. (shrink)

This essay analyses six case studies of theories of exhaustion-related conditions from the early eighteenth century to the present day. It explores the ways in which George Cheyne, George Beard, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Sigmund Freud, Alain Ehrenberg and Jonathan Crary use medical ideas about exhaustion as a starting point for more wide-ranging cultural critiques related to specific social and technological transformations. In these accounts, physical and psychological symptoms are associated with particular external developments, which are thus not just construed as (...) pathology-generators but also pathologized. The essay challenges some of the persistently repeated claims about exhaustion and its unhappy relationship with modernity. (shrink)

The subject of this paper is the problematisation of depression in today’s mental health care. It is based on a study of the professional discussion on depression in Finland from the mid-1980s to the 1990s. The ways in which Finnish mental health experts define the object of depression treatment bring out an ambivalence that stems from the discrepancy between two parallel but incongruent notions of what depression is: the psychopharmacological and the psychotherapeutic. The analysis of the discussion demonstrates how clinical (...) and practical rationales of today’s mental health care are formed in the space between the two poles. Two tendencies of these rationales are also pointed out: first, the DSM paradigm of depressive illness inclines to become problematic and to dissolve in the actual practices. Second, they insinuate emphasis on antidepressant medication and overall neuropsychiatric approach in the treatment of depressive disorders, although in an ambivalent way. (shrink)

‘Cosmetic psychopharmacology’ is a term coined by Peter Kramer in his 1993 best‐seller, Listening to Prozac. It has come to refer to the use of psychoactive substances to effect changes in function for conditions that are either normal or subclinical variants. In this paper, I ask: What distinguishes an existential ailment from clinical depression, or either of those from normal depressed mood, melancholic temperament, dysthymia or other depressive disorders? Can we reliably distinguish one from the other? Are the boundaries of (...) illness and disorder really so distinct? If not, how can we know that treatment of ‘depression’ with Prozac in any given instance constitutes a cosmetic as opposed to, say, a medical or clinical use of psychopharmacology – a distinction that seems to turn on our ability to clearly differentiate the clinical from the cosmetic. If we cannot reliably distinguish between such conditions, can we even have a cosmetic psychopharmacology that is not a form of malpractice, broadly speaking? What if we unplugged Prozac from all the amplitude and hype that resulted in Listening to Prozac becoming an instant best‐seller and simply asked whether or not we can clearly distinguish an appropriate cosmetic use of Prozac for ‘depression’ from an inappropriate cosmetic use of Prozac, and both of those from Prozac's appropriate clinical, that is, non‐cosmetic uses? If we cannot make these distinctions, perhaps it is too early to say there can be such a thing as a cosmetic psychopharmacology. (shrink)

This paper explores the differences between bringing about self-change by way of antidepressants versus psychotherapy from an ethical point of view, taking its starting point in the concept of authenticity. Given that the new antidepressants (SSRIs) are able not only to cure psychiatric disorders but also to bring about changes in the basic temperament structure of the person—changes in self-feeling—does it matter if one brings about such changes of the self by way of antidepressants or by way of psychotherapy? Are (...) antidepressants a less good alternative than psychotherapy because antidepressants are in some way less authentic than psychotherapy? And, if so, what does this mean exactly? In this paper I try to show that the self-change brought about by way of antidepressants challenges basic assumptions of authentic self-change that are deeply ingrained in our Western culture: that changes in self should be brought about by laborious ‘self-work’ in which one explores the deep layers of the self (the unconscious) and comes to realise who one really is and should become. To become oneself has been held to presuppose such a journey. While the assumed importance of self-work appears to be badly founded on closer inspection, the notions of exploring and knowing oneself appear to be more promising in fleshing out an ethical distinction between psychopharmacological and psychotherapeutic practice with the help of the concept of authenticity. Psychotherapy, to a much greater extent than psychopharmacological interventions, involves the whole profile of the self in its attempts to effect a change, not only in the temperament but also in the character of the person in question, and this is important from an ethical point of view. In the article, the concepts of self-change, authenticity, temperament and character are presented and used in order to understand and flesh out the relevant ethical differences between the practice of psychotherapy and the use of antidepressants. Looping, collective effects of psychopharmacological self-change in a cultural context are also considered in this context. (shrink)

Melancholy occupies a privileged place in the Kantian taxonomy of temperaments since the pre- critical phase, but it is in the Nineties that it reveals its philosophical fecundity. Melancholy becomes, in fact, an interesting notion not so much because of its relationship with Kantian biography, nor because of its presence in the description of psychopathies, but because it lies, unique in this, on the borderline between pathology and sanity. Melancholy thus provides an opportunity to show the topicality of Kantian reflection (...) on mental illness since it underlines the continuity, and not the rupture, between the healthy mental state and that affected by illness, in line with today's most widespread tendencies to consider mental illness as a privileged observatory of the subject. (shrink)

In recent years both philosophers and scientists have asked whether or not our current kinds of mental disorder—e.g., schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorder—are natural kinds; and, moreover, whether or not the search for natural kinds of mental disorder is a realistic desideratum for psychiatry. In this dissertation I clarify the sense in which a kind can be said to be “natural” or “real” and argue that, despite a few notable exceptions, kinds of mental disorder cannot be considered natural kinds. Furthermore, I (...) contend that psychopathological phenomena do not cluster together into kinds in the way that paradigmatic natural kinds (e.g., chemical kinds and species) do; and, in light of this fact, I conclude that the normative ideal of natural classification—i.e. classifying real or natural kinds—is not appropriate as a general strategy for psychiatry. In the conclusion to this dissertation I propose an alternative way forward. Rather than assuming a priori that psychopathological phenomena cluster together into kinds, a more tractable and theoretically promising approach would be to first explain how particular kinds of experiences and behaviours—e.g, hallucinations, delusions, disorganized thinking, mania, low mood, etc.—are produced. (shrink)