Delusional mood, a psychological state often preceding schizophrenia, involves a peculiar affective salience in world experience that may contribute to later delusion formation. This paper uses Edmund Husserl's account of affection and affective syntheses to clarify the nature of this experiential abnormality and explain how it leads to delusional mood. The phenomenological account is then related to the neurobiological aberrant salience hypothesis, suggesting a path toward mutual enlightenment between the two approaches.
Depressive rumination involves a disruption in the capacity for inner silence, where individuals yearn for but cannot initiate or maintain a quiet inner state. This inability to achieve inner silence explains the distress of rumination and why therapies like meditation are effective. The analysis draws on first-person depression narratives and recent philosophy of psychiatry and psychology to clarify this underexplored phenomenological aspect, which has been overlooked by higher-level analyses of depression.