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Paul Grobstein's picture

depression continuing, addendum

Two recent conversations suggest ways to both expand the list of facets of depression as an emergent complex system and to better understand the interactions of the components.

  1. Sociophobia, in the sense of a wish to avoid contact with other human beings, should be explicitly added to the list.  But it is itself complex, involving both a reluctance to be with other people and a wish not to be alone.  The key here, I suspect, is a distinction between various forms of interpersonal interactions, some of which are distressing while others are important but are felt to be unlikely to be achieved.
  2. Depression involves a "break down," in the sense that one feels unable to accomplish tasks that one would normally be quite able to do.  And perhaps in a deeper sense as well, that the unconscious givens that one uses as a basic structure for living no longer work well and need to be rebuilt.  Periods of depression may in fact be quite productive in this regard, and this is another way that depression may be an "adaptive" responsive: a period of relative disengagement from "normal" things so as to allow a needed rebuilding. 

Might depression involve less suffering for the individual, less sociophobia, perhaps fewer troubling "symptoms" in general,  if it were seen culturally as a period of altered productivity rather than as an absence of productivity, a partial retreat from some things in the service of others things rather than a complete retreat lacking any justification? 

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