Dr. Alok 'Dr. K' Kanojia

But the good news is that there's been a lot of work that's a little bit older that's been done.

So this is what I thought was really interesting.

So in the explosion of neuroscience—

We've sort of lost sight of these like big picture philosophical approaches to the meaning of life and how to exist as a human.

And so it's really interesting because the more that I try to help people with existential depression, I find that some of these older approaches where human beings were grappling with this stuff in the 40s before science was very sophisticated.

There's a lot of really great stuff there.

And as we dig into that stuff, hopefully it will give you all a road forward, not just in a big picture sense, but also a couple of really specific things that you can do to sort of change your perspective on life.

So let's take a look at what existential depression looks like.

What is blocked or interrupted for the depressive is not the future, but contingency, spontaneity, or openness.

As I see it, the problem with such a patient is not that the future is blocked,

but that it is frozen or determined, that in losing its rhythmical flow and pause, in effect it has achieved a state of disordered perfection or completeness, a situation intolerable in the healthy.

Such an individual with a fixed or frozen future has become an object among objects."

or thing among things.

His loss of the sense of the rhythm of the world and of his life demands that he attempt to reconstitute this sense of interrupted or disordered pause and flow.

Since he feels very foreclosed in terms of the viable future, he feels he must reinstitute, even if by pathologic devices, the disruption of the painful, monadic, unitary closed state he has achieved.

Now, you are probably wondering, what the hell does that mean?

So let's explain.

So here's what Dr. Scher noticed.

Okay?

And then the future is a set of possibilities, right?