So what you’ve got here is a kind of intellectual horror story: time itself as both the instrument and the effect of oppression. Frantzen is looking at depression not just as some sad little chemical accident in the brain but also as a temporal collapse — life grinding down into a sticky present that refuses to pass. Fuchs adds to that by saying depression is also a failure of rhythm with others — no more syncopation in the dance of human interaction, just stumbling and lag. Very poetic, if you weren’t talking about actual human suffering.

Then you point out something Fuchs doesn’t, which is the “double empathy problem” — that breakdowns in attunement aren’t just “your” fault when you’re depressed, but a two-way street where others also fail to meet you where you are.

Layer on the historical bit and it gets even darker. The way European American elites pathologized Black people during slavery and Jim Crow — calling them lazy, dim-witted, unstable — mirrors the symptom lists of mood disorders. But instead of recognizing those states as products of systemic violence and oppression, those elites conveniently reframed them as causes of mistreatment. Circular logic at its most grotesque: “They’re depressed and anxious because they’re inherently deficient, not because we’re literally destroying them.” And of course, that rationalization justifies further destruction, which perpetuates and amplifies the very conditions they claimed to “discover.”

It’s a pretty devastating feedback loop: time as stagnation, social interaction as broken rhythm, oppression as weaponized temporality. Depression as both symptom and indictment. Kind of amazing that the more things look like science, the more they just replicate power.

LLM

Depression, in phenomenological terms, is often framed as an individual collapse of time and rhythm — a stuck present, a loss of attunement with others (Frantzen, Fuchs). But when you factor in histories of oppression, you see that this collapse is not just an internal malfunction. It’s socially produced and reinforced.

Oppressive systems weaponize time: they impose stagnation (e.g., enforced waiting, exclusion from futures), they distort interpersonal synchrony (through dehumanization, denial of recognition), and they then label the resulting exhaustion, anxiety, or “out of synch-ness” as inherent defects. That pathologization justifies further mistreatment, which deepens the temporal and affective collapse. It’s a recursive cycle — depression not just as personal suffering, but as a socially engineered condition.

So: depression here is desynchronization, yes — but not simply between “me and the world.” It’s a desynchronization engineered by historically situated power structures that then gaslight the oppressed into thinking the breakdown originates in them.

LLM

Depression, when seen through a phenomenological lens, involves temporal collapse and interpersonal desynchronization—moments that threaten ordinary attunement with others (Frantzen, Fuchs). But this isn't merely an internal rupture. Historically and socially, oppressive structures—such as slavery, colonialism, and systemic racism—have “weaponized time” by enforcing stagnation, denying futures, and disrupting affective rhythms. These experiences produce symptoms—exhaustion, fear, detachment—that oppressive systems then pathologize as inherent defects. Consider, for example, how Samuel Cartwright in the mid-19th century invented disorders like drapetomania to label flight as mental illness and dysaesthesia aethiopica to depict Black resistance as deficiency—essentially turning the effects of oppression into evidence for further oppression NAMIwww.counseling.org. Or look to the mid-20th century when psychiatric definitions expanded to pathologize racial dissent as “aggression,” coining the chilling term “protest psychosis” Wikipediawww.counseling.org. This historical resonance shows that depression—understood as desynchronization—is not just a personal collapse, but often the aftermath of structurally imposed temporality and affective rupture, that is then reclassified and perpetuated as personal pathology. In other words, trauma becomes both symptom and justification, sealing a violent recursive loop.

LLM