Signal in the Noise: “Ungrieved Futility” in a Comparative Analytic Study of the Depression Literature

Abstract

The modern depression literature goes back more than a century, and yet remains in a preparadigmatic stage of development, lacking consensus on the nature of depression’s dynamic structure. The relatively few attempts to distill and synthesize the existing literatures are partial, typically incorporating only several of depression’s many subliteratures. To address this fragmentation, this study employed a comparative analytic methodology to assess the entirety of the literature, asking whether the subliteratures (grouped as cognitive–behavioral, psychoanalytic, evolutionary, biomedical, phenomenological, existential–humanistic, cybernetic, environmental, and religious–spiritual theories) express a common understanding of depression. Given these literatures’ lack of a shared language and conceptual structure, the construct “Ungrieved Futility” (UF) was used as the fixed comparison point by which they could be related. UF posits that an individuals’ unwillingness or inability to process and abandon (i.e., grieve) futile goals forms the core dynamic structure of depression and organizes depression’s various elements (symptoms, processes, and precursors). This study examined whether and to what degree the various schools of the depression literature share a common core. The analysis showed that the vast majority did express UF, with the exception of the biomedical and some environmental and religious-spiritual theories. It identified a division between theories viewing depression as a coherent entity and those conceptualizing it as an epiphenomenon. In clarifying the literature’s common core, UF offers, in both the research and clinical domains, a possible paradigmatic catalyst to the field.