Lost in Speech: Depressive Rumination and the Dynamics of Inner Silence.
Inquiry November 14, 2025 Peer reviewed DOI: 10.1080/0020174x.2025.2587214 via PubMed
Summary
Depressive rumination involves a disruption in the capacity for inner silence, where individuals yearn for but cannot initiate or maintain a quiet mind. This inability explains the distress of rumination and why therapies like meditation help. The analysis draws on first-person depression narratives and philosophy of psychiatry to clarify this underexplored phenomenological aspect, showing that rumination is not just repetitive negative thinking but a fundamental loss of inner silence.
Study at a glance
| Design | theoretical or philosophical paper |
|---|---|
| Key finding | Depressive rumination involves a disruption in the capacity for inner silence, which accounts for the distress of rumination and the effectiveness of meditation-based therapies. |
Abstract
This paper clarifies the experiential profile of depressive rumination, a form of repetitive and persistent negative thinking that is phenomenologically and aetiologically central in depression. Phenomenological analyses of depression have generally remained too high-level to account for this centrality. Drawing on first-person depression narratives and recent philosophy of psychiatry and psychology, we elucidate an underexplored phenomenological aspect of depressive rumination: a disruption in the capacity for inner silence. This disruption captures ruminating individuals' yearning for but inability to initiate and maintain inner silence. It also explains the distress involved in rumination and the effectiveness of therapies such as meditation.