Matthew Ratcliffe - Experiences of Depression: A study in phenomenology

International Perspectives in Philosophy and Psychiatry

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Stanghellini and Rosfort

Essential Philosophy of Psychiatry

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Woods

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This book is dedicated to the memory of Jonathan Lowe. Our many conversations over the years hugely enriched the space of intellectual possibilities I inhabit. It was a privilege to be his friend.

The research for this book was carried out as part of the project Emotional Experience in Depression: A Philosophical Study. I am very grateful to all my project colleagues, especially Achim Stephan, Jan Slaby, Hannah Bowden, Benedict Smith, Kerrin Jacobs, Somogy Varga, and Angela Woods, for all the time we spent discussing the phenomenology of depression and related topics. I would also like to thank the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation) for funding our research. My work on the phenomenology of depression owes a great deal to the many conversations I have had with philosophers, psychiatrists, psychologists, anthropologists, and others about this and related topics. They include Gwen Adshead, Havi Carel, Jonathan Cole, Giovanna Colombetti, Rachel Cooper, Tom Csordas, Owen Earnshaw, Thomas Fuchs, Bill Fulford, Shaun Gallagher, Philip Gerrans, Peter Goldie (19462011), George Graham, Robin Hendry, Peter Hobson, Gail Hornstein, Daniel Hutto, Ian Kidd, Laurence Kirmayer, Jonathan Lowe (19502014), Wayne Martin, Nick Medford, Gareth Owen, Elizabeth Pienkos, Jennifer Radden, Giovanni Stanghellini, Fredrik Svenaeus, Amanda Taylor Aiken, Henrik Walter, Mark Wynn, and many others. I am especially grateful to Matthew Broome and Louis Sass, for many long and illuminating discussions and also for their comments on draft chapters. Thanks to three anonymous referees for their insightful comments on an outline of this book and, in particular, to two further referees who kindly read and commented on the whole manuscript. I would also like to thank my wife, Beth, and our children, Samuel and Thomas, for putting up with the irritable and despondent moods that sometimes accompanied my writing.

Material from the book was presented at conferences, workshops or seminars hosted by the Tavistock Clinic, Institute of Psychiatry, and Institute of Philosophy, all in London, the Free University of Berlin, the Brocher Centre in Switzerland, the University of the West of England, Birkbeck College London, and the Universities of Central Florida, Cardiff, Copenhagen, Durham, Exeter, Heidelberg, Hull, Lancaster, Manchester, Memphis, Osnabrck, Rutgers, Sdertrn, and Sussex, at a meeting of the International Society for Phenomenological Studies at Asilomar in California, and at conferences organized by the mental health charity SANE and the Gloucestershire Survivors of Bereavement by Suicide group. Thanks to participants in all these events for , published by Imprint Academic. I am grateful to all of the publishers concerned for granting me permission to re-use material.