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My Philosophy of (Most) Depression

In the middle of our life’s walk, I found myself alone in a dark forest… —Dante Alighieri

Like heart disease or diabetes, depression can be highly debilitating, even fatal. But unlike heart disease or diabetes, depression is poorly understood and heavily stigmatised. People with depression are often seen as ‘failures’ or ‘losers’, too weak or lazy to pick themselves up or pull themselves together.

Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. If you feel the way you do, it is most likely because you tried too hard or took on too much—so hard and so much that you made yourself ill with depression. In other words, if you feel the way you do, it is because your world was simply not good enough for you. You wanted more, you wanted better, and you wanted different, not just for yourself but for all those around you.

So if you’re a ‘failure’ or a ‘loser’, that’s only because you set the bar far too high. You could have swept everything under the carpet and pretended, as many people do, that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Instead, you had the honesty and the courage to recognize that something was amiss, that something was not quite right.

Rather than being a failure or a loser, you are all the opposite: you are ambitious, you are truthful, and you are courageous. And that’s precisely why you got ‘ill’.

Depression as a Signal

But here’s the good news. Unlike heart disease or diabetes, depression can also have a silver lining.

Crushing though it may be, depression can present a precious opportunity to identify, acknowledge, and address deep-seated problems.

Just as physical pain evolved to signal injury and prevent further injury, so depression may have evolved to remove us from distressing, damaging, or futile situations—situations that do not serve us well as human beings.

The time and space and solitude afforded by depression can enable us to reassess our needs, reframe our perspectives, and round up the resolve to break with established patterns.

In other words, depression, or the depressive position, may have evolved as a signal that something is seriously wrong and needs working through and changing—or, at the very least, processing and understanding.

In the normal run of things, we become so immersed in our day-to-day that we no longer have the opportunity or perspective to think and feel about ourselves. The adoption of the depressive position invites—or compels—us to shed our defences, stand back at a distance, reassess our needs and priorities, and formulate a modest but realistic plan for fulfilling them.

At a deeper level, the depressive position can enable us to develop a clearer understanding and appreciation of ourselves, our lives, and life in general. From an existential standpoint, it obliges us to become aware of our mortality and freedom, and challenges us to exercise the latter within the framework of the former. By meeting this ultimate challenge, we are able to break out of the mould that has been imposed upon us, discover who we truly are, and begin to give deep meaning to our lives.

The Gift of the Dark Wood

It can be no coincidence that so many of history’s most creative and insightful people suffered from depression, or from a state that might today be diagnosed as depression. They include Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, Leo Tolstoy, and many others.

To quote Marcel Proust, who himself suffered from depression, ‘Happiness is good for the body, but it is grief which develops the strengths of the mind.’

The concept of depression as a mental disorder may be helpful for the more severe and intractable cases treated by hospital psychiatrists, but probably not for the majority of cases, which, for the most part, are mild and short-lived and more readily understood in terms of life circumstances, human nature, or the human condition.

Thinking of our distress or protest or withdrawal in terms of a mental disorder or chemical imbalance in the brain can be counterproductive, insofar as it can prevent us from identifying and addressing the important life problems or psychological issues that lie at the root of our distress, and that are, almost literally, crying out for our care and attention.

Maybe all this is more common sense than philosophy, but I do think it merits saying.

In the middle of our life’s walk
I found myself alone in a dark forest
Where my path was confused.

Ah how hard it is to retell
How dense, dark, and dangerous
The thought of it alone fills me with fear!

So bitter that death is scarcely worse;
But to speak of the good I found there,
I shall tell of the other things that I saw.

—Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, Inferno

Continue Exploring

If this article spoke to you, you might look into The Meaning of Madness, my award-winning exploration of what mental disorders can teach us about human nature and the human condition.

If you are struggling with depression, you can also download my practical self-help guide Growing from Depression free of charge.

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The Deepest Cure for Fear and Anxiety—No Prescription Required

A man standing on top of a pyramid, which represents Maslow's pyramid
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs culminates in self-actualization. But the journey does not end there.

In his influential paper of 1943, A Theory of Human Motivation, the psychologist Abraham Maslow proposed that healthy human beings have a certain number of needs, and that these needs can be arranged in a hierarchy, with some needs (such as physiological and safety needs) being more primitive or basic than others (such as social and ego needs).

Maslow’s ‘hierarchy of needs’ is often represented as a five-level pyramid (Figure 1), with higher needs coming into focus only once lower, more basic ones have been met. Maslow called the bottom four levels ‘deficiency needs’ because we do not feel anything if they are met but become anxious or distressed if they are not. Thus, physiological needs such as eating, drinking, and sleeping are deficiency needs, as are safety needs, social needs such as friendship and intimacy, and ego needs such as self-esteem, status, and recognition.

In contrast, he called the fifth and highest level of the pyramid a ‘growth need’ insofar as the drive to self-actualize requires that we move beyond the pursuit of comfort and security to fulfil our deepest potential as human beings.

Once we have met our deficiency needs, the focus of our anxiety shifts to self-actualization, and we begin, even if only dimly, to contemplate our bigger picture. However, only a minority of people ever truly self-actualize, because self-actualization requires unusual qualities such as independence, awareness, creativity, originality, and, above all, courage. Many people who have satisfied all their deficiency needs remain unable to self-actualize, instead inventing more deficiency needs for themselves, because to contemplate the meaning of life would lead them to entertain the possibility of its meaninglessness and the prospect of their own death and annihilation.

Existential Anxiety

A person who begins to contemplate their bigger picture may come to fear that life is meaningless and death inescapable, while at the same time clinging to the comforting belief that they are somehow immortal, important, or at least significant. This inner conflict gives rise to existential anxiety. Whereas fear and anxiety and their pathological forms (such as phobias or panic disorder) are grounded in threats to life, existential anxiety is rooted in the brevity and apparent insignificance, or absurdity, of life.

Existential anxiety is so disturbing that most people avoid it at all costs, instead constructing a false reality out of goals, ambitions, routines, relationships, customs, values, culture, and religion in a bid to deceive themselves that their lives are meaningful and that death is distant or delusory.

Unfortunately, such self-deception comes at a heavy price. According to the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, those who refuse to face up to ‘non-being’ are acting in ‘bad faith’ and living out a life that is inauthentic and unfulfilling. Facing up to non-being can bring insecurity, loneliness, responsibility, and, with them, anxiety, but, beyond that, it can also bring a profound sense of calm, freedom, even nobility. Far from being pathological, existential anxiety is a necessary transitional phase—a sign of health, strength, and courage, and a harbinger of greater things to come.

The Courage to Be

The theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich took this idea a step further. In The Courage to Be, he argued that refusing to confront non-being leads not only to inauthenticity, as Sartre had argued, but also to pathological—or neurotic—anxiety.

He wrote:

He who does not succeed in taking his anxiety courageously upon himself can succeed in avoiding the extreme situation of despair by escaping into neurosis. He still affirms himself but on a limited scale. Neurosis is the way of avoiding nonbeing by avoiding being.

According to this striking outlook, pathological anxiety, although seemingly grounded in threats to life, in fact arises from repressed existential anxiety, which itself arises from our uniquely human capacity for self-consciousness.

Squaring up to non-being enables us to put our life into perspective, see it in its entirety, and thereby lend it a sense of direction and unity. If the ultimate source of anxiety is fear of the future, the future ends in death; and if the ultimate source of anxiety is uncertainty, death is the only certainty. It is only by facing up to death, accepting its inevitability, and integrating it into a life that we can escape from the pettiness and paralysis of anxiety, and, in so doing, free ourselves to make—and get—the most out of our lives. 

This, I believe, is the philosophical cure for fear and anxiety.

Some philosophers have gone further still in asserting that the very purpose of life is none other than to prepare for death. In Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates, who is about to face the executioner, tells his friends that absolute justice, beauty, and goodness cannot be apprehended by the senses, but only by pure thought, that is, by the mind or soul. Thus, the philosopher seeks as far as possible to separate soul from body. As death is the complete separation of soul and body, the philosopher aims at death—and can be said to be almost dead.

Only a true philosopher who no longer fears death truly possesses courage and the other virtues. Those who remain in fear of death can only have, at best, the appearance of virtue; but behind the facade, they are forever trading one fear against another.

Continue Exploring

To explore these ideas further, see The Meaning of Madness.

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If you’re struggling with depression, or know someone who is, I’d like you to have this book—free of charge.

What if depression were a blessing as well as a curse? This is a book about how depression can have benefits as well as costs, and how to reap those benefits while making yourself feel better—better, in fact, than ever before.

Drawing on psychiatry, psychology, philosophy, and literature, Dr Neel Burton explores depression not only as an illness to be treated, but also as an opportunity for insight, growth, and transformation.

🏆 Semi-finalist, the BookLife Prize

🏆 Highly Commended, the BMA Book Awards

A comprehensive, sympathetic, and thought-provoking guide for those who want to explore their depression in more depth. —The British Journal of Psychiatry

Neel is an incredibly insightful and elegant writer, with a deep knowledge of all he surveys. —Dr James Davies, psychotherapist, author of Cracked

I have read most of Dr. Neel Burton’s books and have enjoyed them immensely … All in all, I found this to be a very insightful and engaging book on depression. —Jamie Bee, Amazon.com Top 50 Reviewer

DOWNLOAD FOR FREE

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If Freud is the father of psychoanalysis, Schopenhauer is the grandfather. Here’s why.

In 1809, the twenty-one-year-old Arthur Schopenhauer matriculated at the University of Göttingen, nominally to study medicine and satisfy his interest in the natural sciences. In Göttingen, the skeptic Gottlob Ernst Schulze introduced him to Plato and Kant. Arthur remarked to Schulze, “Life is a tricky business. I’ve decided to spend it trying to understand it.” With that, he left Göttingen to pursue his studies at the newly founded University of Berlin, which had fast risen into Germany’s premier centre of philosophy.

In Berlin, Schopenhauer attended lectures by Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the head of the department, and found him to be abstruse and tedious. He thought of Fichte as a charlatan and second-rate Kant, and, in his notes, referred to his philosophy as a “world-comedy”. He held the dogmatic Friedrich Schleiermacher in equal contempt, and his notes on Schleiermacher’s lectures reveal a budding atheism. He never regretted his beginnings as a medical student. Even at Berlin, he attended more lectures in the sciences and medicine than in philosophy, since, he believed, a philosopher ought to have a strong grounding in the sciences.

The relationship between madness and genius

And not just the sciences, but life itself. In the winter of 1812, Arthur began visiting patients in the “melancholy ward” of Berlin’s Charité hospital to investigate the relationship between madness and genius. In his lectures, Fichte had characterised genius as “divine” and madness as “animal”, but Arthur, who was no stranger to mental illness, suspected the two to be intertwined. “Genius” he would write in The World as Will, “lives only one storey above madness.”

Many of the patients he spoke to were or had been highly accomplished people. They were perfectly capable of rational thought, even of wit, and rarely erred in their knowledge of the immediate present. Madness, he surmised, is not a disturbance of the rational faculty. Instead, it arises when the past is too painful to bear. When this happens, memories are repressed, and may be replaced by new “memories”. “If … certain events or circumstances are wholly suppressed for the intellect, because the will cannot bear the sight of them; and then, if the resultant gaps are arbitrarily filled up for the sake of the necessary connection, we then have madness.” “True mental health” in contrast, “consists in perfect recollection of the past.”

Schopenhauer conceived of genius as an ability to rise into timelessness, to see time merely, in that famous phrase of Plato, “as the moving image of eternity”. Thus, what genius and madness share in common is a disrupted relationship with time. Whereas the madman has lost the thread of the “where” and “when”, the genius can still pick it up, but disentangles himself to better concentrate on the “what”.

What Freud said about it

Freud, who was four years old when Schopenhauer died, denied having been at all influenced by him. But in 1914, he conceded: “What [Schopenhauer] says about the struggle against accepting a distressing piece of reality coincides with my concept of repression so completely that once again I owe the chance of making a discovery to my not being well read.”

Again, in 1925, Freud wrote: “I have carefully avoided any contact with philosophy proper. The large extent to which psychoanalysis coincides with the philosophy of Schopenhauer—not only did he assert the dominance of the emotions and the supreme importance of sexuality, but he was even aware of the mechanism of repression—is not to be traced to my acquaintance with his teaching. I read Schopenhauer very late in my life.”

If Freud is the father of psychoanalysis, Schopenhauer is the grandfather.

Neel Burton is author of The German Greeks: German Philosophy and the German Philosophers.

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Three ancient mind exercises for processing and subliming bad news.

Imagine: Your house has been burgled. You’ve been fired. Your partner cheated or walked out on you. You’ve been diagnosed with a life-changing condition…

Bad news can leave us in a state of dread and despair. It seems like our whole world is falling apart, almost as if we’re being driven into the ground. We fear the very worst and cannot get it out of our mind, or gut. Often, there are other emotions mangled in, like anger, guilt, despair, betrayal, and love.

Bad news: we’ve all had it, and the worst is yet to come.

So, how best to cope?

I’m going to give you three cognitive strategies, or mind exercises, that I picked up from the Stoic philosophers—who, in the second century, could count the Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius, among their followers.

All three strategies aim, in one way or another, at generating perspective. While reading, hold a recent piece of bad news in the front of your mind, and consider how the strategies might or might not apply to your bad news.

Contextualization

Try to frame the bad news, to put it into its proper context. Think about all the good things in your life, including those that have been and those that are yet to come. Remind yourself of all the strengths and resources—the friends, facilities, and faculties—that you can draw upon in your time of need. Imagine how things could be much, much worse—and how for some people they actually are. Your house may have been burgled. Yes, you lost some valuables and it’s all such a huge hassle. But you still have your health, your job, your partner… Bad things are bound to hit us now and then, and it can only be a matter of time before they hit us again. In many cases, they are just the flip side of the good things that we enjoy. You got burgled, because you had a house and valuables. You lost a great relationship, because you had one in the first place. In that much, many a bad thing is no more than the removal or reversal of a good one.

Negative visualization

Now focus on the bad news itself. What’s the worst that could happen, and is that really all that bad? Now that you’ve got the worst out of the way, what’s the best possible outcome? And what’s the most likely outcome? Imagine that someone is threatening to sue you. The worst possible outcome is that you lose the case and suffer all the entailing cost, stress, and emotional and reputational hurt. Though it’s unlikely, you might even do time in prison (it has happened to some, and a few, like Bertrand Russell, did rather well out of it). But the most likely outcome is that you reach some sort of out-of-court settlement. And the best possible outcome is that you win the case, or better still, it gets dropped.

Transformation

Finally, try to transform your bad news into something positive, or into something that has positive aspects. Your bad news may represent a learning or strengthening experience, or act as a wake-up call, or force you to reassess your priorities. At the very least, it offers a window into the human condition and an opportunity to exercise dignity and self-control. Maybe you lost your job: time for a holiday and a promotion, or a career change, or the freedom and fulfilment of self-employment. Maybe your partner cheated on you. Even so, you feel sure that he or she still loves you, that there is still something there. Perhaps you can even bring yourself to look at it from his or her perspective. Yes, of course it’s painful, but it may also be an opportunity to forgive, to build a closer intimacy, to re-launch your relationship—or to go out and find a more fulfilling one. You’ve been diagnosed with a serious medical condition. Though it’s terrible news, it’s also the chance to get the support and treatment that you need, to take control, to fight back, to look at life and your relationships from another, richer perspective.

A Taoist story for the road

There’s a Taoist story about an old farmer whose only horse ran away. “Such terrible news!” said a neighbour. “Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t,” replied the farmer. The next day, the horse returned with six wild horses. “Such wonderful news!” exclaimed the neighbour. “Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t,” replied the farmer. The day after that, the farmer’s son tried to tame one of the wild horses but got thrown off and broke a leg. “Such terrible news!” cried the neighbour. “Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t,” replied the farmer, biting into a peach. A week later, war broke out: thanks to his broken leg, the farmer’s son managed to escape military conscription. “It all worked out really well in the end,” said the neighbour, “such great luck!”

“Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t,” replied the farmer, rolling his eyes.

Neel Burton is author of Growing from Depression, which is currently free to download from his website bookstore.