Depression

When I wrote about infirmity in Life is Hard, I did so with a caveat: I would treat only physical disability and somatic pain. I gave myself excuses: it would be rash to assume that psychological disability and psychic pain have much in common with their physical counterparts; and the book speaks to at least some forms of emotional distress in other chapters. But in truth, I was anxious that the subject is too hard.

I seem to have good—or plentiful—company. In a bracing post on the website of the American Philosophical Association, Brendan de Kenessey does the math:

The first time I was hospitalized for depression, it occurred to me to ask whether my fellow philosophers had anything to say about my condition. Walking down the long white halls to the inpatient ward’s lone, decade-old desktop computer, I searched Philpapers.org, a philosophy bibliography, for “depression.” Depression has its own category, with 179 entries—but if you filter out the entries that are not philosophy, not abou…