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18 Diagnosis DepressedThinking Call it mulling, call it ruminating, it is a strange way to think, and a mind in darkness often convinces itself that it sees with clarity. But even though your thoughts seem to be going around and around without aim or point, they are thoughts, they are going somewhere—­ only they’re not taking the straightest path to get there. Yet to think in circles and in excess, to ponder too much, too long, and too deeply—­ what French speakers call ressasser—­ is often perceived to be the opposite of thought because it doesn’t go anywhere . Today, we largely see medicalization as progress because to think of depression as a pathological disorder cloaks it, as well as other mental disturbances, in the sort of objective discourse that is supposed to preclude moral judgment. It seems hardly necessary to show once more that this alleged objectivity of medical discourse is, in reality, shot through with ideology and moralism.Especially pernicious with this operation,however,is the way it isolates“the patient” by individualizing his or her suffering.To define depression as a disorder afflicting individuals allows order, by contrast, to remain the normal condition, and normalizing force, of the social. This is what I meant when I noted that one is always depressed alone: depression, understood as a disease of the mind, is too often denied its potential for relationality. Who in their right mind would want to partake in it? Pathologization isolates more powerfully than condemnation. Moral misery, however , loves company. In fact it thrives on it, which is why melancholia, unlike clinical depression, may represent an alternative way of thinking and being in the world as a kind of collective alienation. Depressed thinking, in other words, is thinking with and across difference, and it is a manner of sharing. ...

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