GrieF and depression
Mourning, Melancholia, And The Grief That Turns Inward
Depression is often described in terms of symptoms: low mood, lack of motivation, changes in sleep or appetite, difficulty concentrating. While these descriptions can be useful, they don’t always capture the experience of depression—or explain why it can feel so enduring and hard to shift.
From a psychoanalytic perspective, many forms of depression are closely tied to grief. Not always the kind of grief we recognize or talk about openly, but losses that have never been fully felt, named, or worked through.
This page explores how depression can emerge when grief gets stuck.
When Grief Doesn’t Look Like Grief
Many people associate grief with tears, sadness, and a clear sense of missing someone or something. But in clinical practice, grief often looks quieter and more diffuse.
Some people feel emotionally flat rather than sad. Others carry a persistent heaviness, self-criticism, or sense of emptiness they can’t explain. They may say things like:
“I’ve always felt this way.”
“Nothing terrible happened, but I never feel quite right.”
In these cases, depression may not be the absence of happiness, but the presence of an ungrieved loss.
Mourning: The Work of Letting Go
Grieving is not a passive process. It requires the mind to gradually accept that something important is truly gone—whether that is a person, a relationship, a role, a sense of self, or an imagined future.
To mourn, we have to:
Feel the pain of absence
Tolerate anger, longing, and disappointment
Slowly loosen our emotional ties to what has been lost
This process is painful, uneven, and takes time. When it is allowed to unfold, people often find that their emotional energy can eventually return to life.
When it cannot unfold, the mind finds another way to survive.
Why Some Losses Are Too Hard to Grieve
Not all losses feel safe to mourn.
Grief can become overwhelming when:
The relationship involved deep love and deep resentment
The loss threatens one’s sense of identity or stability
Acknowledging the loss would bring up intense guilt, anger, or dependency
The loss is invisible or socially unrecognized (miscarriage, infertility, divorce, loss of an ideal, loss of a future that never arrived)
In these situations, fully facing the loss can feel emotionally dangerous. Rather than consciously grieving, the mind protects itself by turning away from the pain.
But what cannot be grieved does not simply disappear.
Depression as Grief Turned Inward
When letting go feels impossible, the mind may take a different path. Instead of accepting the loss, it keeps the relationship alive internally.
In plain terms: if losing someone or something feels unbearable, the psyche finds a way to hold on by carrying it inside.
Over time, this can lead to a particular form of depression—often quiet, chronic, and hard to explain. The pain of the loss doesn’t feel like grief anymore. It shows up as a problem with the self.
Why Depression Often Comes With Harsh Self-Criticism
When a loss is carried internally, the emotions connected to it—anger, disappointment, longing—no longer have a clear place to go.
Instead, they often turn inward.
This can look like:
Persistent self-criticism
Shame or feelings of defectiveness
A sense of being a burden
Feeling “bad” or “wrong” without knowing why
The person is not weak or broken. They are living with unresolved grief that has nowhere else to land.
What This Kind of Depression Can Feel Like
This form of depression is not always dramatic or obvious. Many people continue to function well on the outside while feeling quietly depleted on the inside.
Common experiences include:
Emotional flatness or numbness
Difficulty wanting or hoping
Chronic low mood
A sense of emptiness or meaninglessness
The belief that something is fundamentally wrong with oneself
Because the loss is often unnamed or unconscious, the depression can feel permanent—as if it has always been there.
Examples from Therapy
A person who struggles with depression after the death of a parent, but cannot grieve openly because doing so would also mean facing years of unmet needs.
Someone who experiences relentless self-criticism after a breakup, without recognizing how much anger and disappointment they feel toward the former partner.
A person living with depression after infertility, where the loss is not a person but a future life and identity that never came into being.
In each case, the depressive symptoms are connected to a loss that has not yet been fully mourned.
How Therapy Can Help
In therapy, the goal is not to force grief or push for emotional catharsis. Instead, therapy creates a space where losses can gradually become thinkable, nameable, and emotionally tolerable.
As grief finds words and feelings find direction, depression often begins to shift. What once felt like a permanent flaw in the self can slowly be recognized as pain with a history.
Grief that can be mourned has the capacity to move. Depression rooted in unmourned loss does not mean something is wrong with you—it means something important mattered.