maaarine:

Depression is more than low mood – it’s a change of consciousness (Cecily Whiteley and Jonathan Birch, Psyche, Nov 08 2021)

“People who’ve never been through depression might assume it’s just an extreme form of feeling low.

Don’t we all find that our daily activities can sometimes lose their sparkle? Yet, accounts of people with depression point in a different direction.

As another person said to the psychologist Dorothy Rowe, recorded in her book The Experience of Depression (1978):

‘I awoke into a different world. It was as though all had changed while I slept: that I awoke not into normal consciousness but into a nightmare.’ (…)

Neuroscientists and philosophers of consciousness have recently coined a new term – the global state of consciousness – to describe the structural properties of experience that varies between ordinary wakefulness, dreaming, the psychedelic state and the minimally conscious state.

These states are called ‘global’ because the whole of conscious experience is altered, not just a particular element.

The fine detail of what we experience in everyday waking life changes all the time (sounds, colours, odours all come and go), but the structure stays largely fixed:

I feel myself to be present in the world, at the centre of an integrated, coherent point of view; time carries on flowing at the same rate; space has the same geometric structure.

The global state is this overarching structure and ordinarily stays constant as particular experiences pass us by.

When we dream, take psychedelics or suffer a brain injury, this structure can be altered, and we enter a different global state.

Could depression belong in this family too?

What people with depression describe as their ‘world’ or their ‘nightmare’ might be a distinctive global state, in which some of the structural pillars of ordinary experience (such as the sense of self, space and time) are distorted.

Not a ‘dream’ or a ‘trip’, but a state that belongs in the same group. (…)

But why might psychedelic therapy work as a treatment for depression?

One common suggestion is that psychedelics provide individuals with an uninhibited space or window for insight and emotional release.

Yet the idea that depression is an altered state of consciousness suggests a different explanation: it could be that psychedelics work by forcing a transition between global states of consciousness.

First, they propel a depressed patient into a new state of consciousness, the psychedelic state.

At the end of the episode, the patient must transition out of it – but into what?

Perhaps, after a psychedelic trip, the patient can emerge into a state of ordinary consciousness, rather than the ‘nightmare’ of the depressed state.

The idea is that psychedelics might work to reset or reboot a patient’s global state of consciousness.

On this hypothesis, being depressed is like being stuck in a dream from which you cannot wake. Psychedelics are the jolt that finally wakes you up.”