Check out the article below on "Depression as a Disorder of Consciousness" by Cecily Whiteley. It's a step in the right direction. We need look more closely at the history, phenomenology, and shifts in consciousness and relationship we label depression, bipolar, schizophrenia and more. How did these experiences get named? From what standard of knowledge? With which philosophical assumptions? What are people truly experiencing and why?
"Existing attempts to utilise these phenomenological observations in a psychiatric context are challenged by the fact that this experiential ‘shift’ characteristic of depression appears mysterious and resists analysis in scientific terms. This paper offers a way out of this predicament. The hypothesis proposed is that when an individual becomes depressed, the individual departs from a state of ordinary wakeful consciousness and enters a distinctive global state of consciousness akin to dreaming and the psychedelic state."
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