Depression as emotional and social disconnection

Many models are used to try to understand depressive mood disorder (DMD). A productive model is to understand DMD as caused by family levels of emotional and social disconnection. For example, if parents are unable/don't give appropriate amounts of emotional nurturance then the infant/child does not learn how to connect emotionally to them and then to others. Psychotherapies tend to work because all involve relationship with a therapist who actively but often implicitly offers a relation. And, much of what therapists do encourages greater contact through behavioural or 'action' assignments or directly through 'interpersonal therapy'. In these assignments, it should not be forgotten that all aspects of the person are involved, not just cognitive, emotional or 'behavioural' facets. At another level, families can sometimes be isolated and cut off from the mainstream culture because of their religious or ethnic allegiances. These links also imply disconnects with school and work situations where the differentness of the family may not be tolerated or understood. The latter raises the question of the character of the culture in which widespread DMD arises. Present western societies are dominated by the clash between a drive to subdue the natural world through science and technology on the one hand, and the equally urgent desire to promote the autonomy of the human personality on the other. My present thesis is that each of these idolatries -- for each idolatrises some relative part of temporal reality -- promotes societal disconnection: each does this by not only suppressing a fair estimation of its opponent's claims but also by wholesale distortion a range of other normative considerations. Such action has culture-wide grievous effects, which are also found in the psychological area of mood disorders.