Depression. Biological Malfunction or Existential Suffering?

This article critically examines the dominant biomedical understanding of depression as a neurobiological disorder and proposes an alternative hermeneutic Daseinsanalytic interpretation of depression as a form of existential suffering with hidden meaning. Drawing on Foucault, Heidegger, and contemporary critiques of biopsychiatric reason, the article argues that modern psychiatry is embedded in a technological and functionalistic regime of truth that reduces human existence to measurable biological functions and interprets depressive symptoms as manifestations of neurochemical malfunction. This reductionist framework, it is argued, obscures the qualitative depth and existential significance of depressive experience. In contrast, the article develops a hermeneutic Daseinsanalytic perspective inspired by Holzhey-Kunz, which understands psychopathology not primarily as disease or deficiency, but as meaningful modes of suffering that express a heightened sensitivity to fundamental ontological conditions of human existence. From this perspective, depression is interpreted as an existential crisis related to freedom, responsibility, and the loss of existential security, rather than as a purely biological dysfunction. The depressive experience is shown to involve a confrontation with the nothingness of existence and a refusal or incapacity to assume the burden of subjectivity and self-responsibility. The article concludes that hermeneutic Daseinsanalysis offers a philosophically and clinically significant alternative to the disease-centred model of depression by reorienting understanding from biological causation to existential meaning, and by opening psychopathology to interpretation rather than mere functional explanation.