Depression, Emotion and the Self

This volume addresses the question of what it is like to be depressed. Despite the vast amount of research that has been conducted into the causes and treatment of depression, the experience of depression remains poorly understood. Indeed, many depression memoirs state that the experience is impossible for others to understand. However, it is at least clear that changes in emotion, mood, and bodily feeling are central to all forms of depression, and these are the book’s principal focus. In recent years, there has been a great deal of valuable philosophical and interdisciplinary research on the emotions, complemented by new developments in philosophy of psychiatry and scientifically-informed phenomenology. The book draws on all these areas, in order to offer a range of novel insights into the nature of depression experiences. To do so, it brings together a distinguished group of philosophers, psychiatrists, anthropologists, clinical psychologists and neuroscientists, all of whom have made important contributions to current research on emotion and/or psychiatric illness.

Keywords: Depression, emotion, mood, bodily feeling, psychiatry, philosophy, phenomenology, mental illness, self, being-in-the-world, enactive, agency, suicide, suicidal, mania, melancholy, melancholia, schizophrenia, borderline, vitality, somatic illness, intercorporeality, interaffectivity, affectivity, neurobiology, despair, phenomenal depth, depersonalization, depersonalisation