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Aqwis | 4 years ago

While I don't think anything in the linked article is wrong per se, it's a very brief look at a complicated and interesting topic. I'm slowly working my way through Ratcliffe's Experiences of Depression (mentioned in the article), which is basically "the" volume on this topic. It's a highly technical book (surprisingly so given the wide variety of people I've seen talking about it), so be prepared for a lot of psych jargon, but it's rewarding if you want to take a deeper dive into how depression feels than you get through reading the dry definitions in the DSM and similar resources. It probably helps with comprehension to have had depressive experiences yourself and possibly even more to have experienced a wide variety of conscious states (through psychotropic medication, psychedelics, other mental illnesses, shocking life experiences or otherwise).

I'd say the book is so important that I wish the author would write a book on the same topic but in simpler language (popsci-esque, except less superficial than the typical popsci book) that could be read by a wider audience than Experiences of Depression. I think a lot of people have severe difficulties understanding depressed friends or family because the nuances of the experience of a depressed person are so difficult to convey in words. Such a book could help bridge the gap.

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