Abstract:
The article analyzes the emergence of depression as the most frequent mental illness in late modernity. From the sociological existentialism of Peters (2017)Peters, Gabriel. 2017. A ordem social como problema psíquico: Do existencialismo sociológico à epistemologia insana. São Paulo: Annablume., he conceives depression as a particular mode of ontological insecurity. He maintains that the increase in diagnoses is understandable based on three broad interpretative keys linked to transformations in late-modern societies. The first refers to a growing pathologization of anguish associated with the emergence of ways of conceptualizing psychic suffering. The second refers to the deepening of the self-realization imperatives that cause pathologies of the exhaustion of the self. The third highlights the expansion of a multiplicity of reference guides that manifests itself in a loss of meaning of existence. Contemporary depression simultaneously represents a rhetorical, action and sense pathology correlative with figurations of the pathologized, tired and lost subject.
Keywords
Depression; Sociological existentialism; Ontological security; Late modernity