Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology

The goal of this paper is to give an account of typical changes of existential and atmospheric feelings in depressive comportment. It seems quite obvious that patterns of depressive experience and behavior differ in many respects from ‘normal’ patterns of encounters with the world. Although these patterns are manifested by a variety of surface behaviors, our interest lies rather in the general structure that underlies depressive comportment (here, particularly as it is expressed by more specific experiences, evaluative patterns, and behaviors). To understand how severe the changes are that are characteristic of depressive comportment, we first introduce a structure that implicitly underlies most of our encounters with the world, namely affective intentionality. The concept of affective intentionality captures the experiential unity of phenomenality and intentionality, as well as the bodily aspects, which are expressed in human comportments. To develop, eventually, in more detail how depressive comportment differs from nondepressive comportments, we provide a detailed analysis of narratives found in autobiographical reports of depressed persons published over the last 40 years. We also take into account responses to an online survey that was conducted as part of a philosophical study of depression at the University of Durham with the support of SANE, London. The analysis unfolds along the dimensions of both elementary and non-elementary existential feelings, as well as atmospheric feelings.