ABSTRACT
Both depression and mania involve a specific comportment and a distinctive mode of engagement with the world. Among agents whose autonomy is more intact, patterns of behavior and habits of mind are loosely assembled, relatively fluid, and susceptible to ongoing change. Agents with mood disorders, in contrast, tend to get “stuck” in inflexible habits of behavior and attention. There emerge recurrent and engrained patterns of engagement and interpretation that are particularly resistant to change. As a result, there is a mismatch between what agents care about and what they actually do, and many motor, social, and mental affordances are experienced as closed off. The overly rigid habits associated with mood disorders signify a disruption to the flexibility of agency that undermines the capacity for self-equilibration and makes it difficult for agents to enact various social roles. What is more, the apathy found in some cases of severe depression and the fluctuations in mood characteristic of bipolar disorder can pose difficulties for the maintenance of enduring commitments; such impairments undermine the stability of agency and make it more difficult for agents with these mood disorders to form what some theorists have called a “deep self.”
