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Depression: Illness, Insight, and Identity
- Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 6, Number 4, December 1999
- pp. 271-286
- Article
- Additional Information
Depression needs to be understood within interdisciplinary scientific, biopsychosocial, therapeutic frameworks, but it also has a moral dimension. The tendency to oppose moral and therapeutic perspectives, as well as to replace moral outlooks with mental-health outlooks, handicaps thinking about depression and many other topics. John Stuart Mill's midlife crisis illustrates how an experience of depression can be both a sickness and a source of moral insight. Furthermore, therapy has a moral dimension, and conversely a humane outlook is interwoven with health-oriented approaches and avoids excessive blaming and guilt. Complicating matters, depression sometimes undermines moral autonomy, and there is a continuum between healthy and unhealthy depression.