Dr. Angelos Sofocleous on Melancholia: Ancient Philosophy, Depression, and the Good Life

Dr. Angelos Sofocleous is a philosopher whose work focuses on depression, melancholia, and the lived experience of mental distress through phenomenology. He studied Philosophy and Psychology at Durham University, where he completed both his BA and MA in Philosophy, and later earned his PhD in Philosophy from the University of York. His doctoral work examined how depression alters interpersonal relationships and changes a person’s way of being in the world. His research has explored themes such as non-participant spectatorship, unhomelikeness, temporality, and mindfulness in depression. He has published in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology on major depressive disorder and treatment, and a 2025 journal article lists him as affiliated with the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in Greece.

In this interview, Scott Douglas Jacobsen speaks with Dr. Angelos Sofocleous about ancient philosophy, modern phenomenology, depression, melancholia, and the question of the good life. Sofocleous suggests that ancient thinkers approached mental suffering less through diagnosis and more through reflection on one’s way of living, bodily condition, and relation to the world. He contrasts older humoral and spiritual accounts of melancholia with contemporary psychiatric models, while arguing that suffering itself remains a basic human reality. The discussion touches on Aristotle’s empirical interests, Zeno of Citium’s Stoic response to adversity, and the continuing value of philosophical traditions that help people make sense of hardship and live with greater steadiness.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You have worked extensively on existentialism and depression, with a personal dimension informing your analysis. Ancient philosophers addressed similar phenomena without the modern diagnostic language we use today. They had greater scope for introspection but lacked advanced empirical tools and treatments.

How did philosophers who treated this subject seriously approach it? Given the same cognitive and emotional apparatus, what methods did they use? How does that compare to modern philosophers who incorporate contemporary psychiatry, diagnostic criteria, and clinical frameworks? The subjective experience remains, but the interpretive framework differs.

Sofocleous: My work on ancient philosophers includes questions that would now fall under the study of mental disorder. These thinkers relied heavily on observation and explanation. In that sense, they were not only philosophers in the modern sense, but also careful students of nature and human life. Aristotle, for instance, asks why the Nile overflows in summer rather than winter, why sounds seem louder at night, and how bodily and environmental conditions shape experience. That matters because it shows that ancient philosophy was often grounded in ordinary life rather than detached from it.

When they tried to understand melancholia, they did so partly by observing others and partly by reflecting on experience itself. They paid attention to what it is like to suffer, to withdraw from others, to lose interest in things, or to feel weighed down by one’s own thoughts. They did not have psychiatry, neuroscience, or diagnostic manuals, of course, but they were often very serious readers of human life. Ancient philosophy was deeply concerned with the question of how to live well, and that naturally included asking what disrupts a good life, whether sadness, fear, grief, despair, or some more lasting form of disturbance.

Once you begin asking how one ought to live, you also begin asking why life so often goes wrong. So their reflections on melancholia were not separate from ethics. They were part of a larger attempt to understand disorder, suffering, and the possibility of regaining some shape or meaning in one’s life. Modern philosophers who write about depression often do so in conversation with psychiatry and clinical frameworks, and that has obvious value. It brings greater precision and helps us distinguish different kinds of suffering. But I still think the ancients remind us of something important: lived distress is never exhausted by a diagnosis alone.

Jacobsen: When ancient thinkers discussed melancholia and similar states, how did they frame them in relation to the good life? Not necessarily as direct opposites, but as part of that broader picture. Do modern, empirically grounded understandings of these mental states provide a better framework for building a good life—or for asking better questions about it—given how many people experience depression or melancholy at some point?

Sofocleous: If we look at ancient explanations of melancholia, many of them would now count as pre-scientific. We find references to demonic possession, spiritual disturbance, and bodily imbalance. The word melancholia itself comes from the Greek melaina chole, or black bile, which points to the old humoral picture. So there is an obvious historical gap between those explanations and modern accounts.

Modern approaches usually work with symptom clusters, diagnostic criteria, severity, and sometimes neurochemical models. Ancient thinkers were often doing something rather different. They were less interested in isolating a condition from the rest of a person’s life and more interested in the whole shape of that life. Melancholia could be connected to one’s habits, relationships, surroundings, moral outlook, and way of inhabiting the world. In other words, it was not treated simply as something happening inside the individual, but as something bound up with a broader way of living.

That way of thinking encouraged reflection of a different kind. A person might ask: what in my life is out of order? What is causing this anxiety or distress? What habits are harming me? How am I living, and what kind of world am I living in? The focus was not simply on naming symptoms, but on examining one’s form of life. That is one reason ancient thought still has something to offer. It keeps questions of suffering close to questions of meaning, conduct, and self-understanding.

At the same time, modern empirical frameworks do give us things the ancient world simply did not have. They can help us identify severe depression, distinguish it from ordinary sadness, and develop treatments that would have been unavailable in antiquity. So I would not set the two approaches against one another too sharply. Each sees something the other can miss. Psychiatry offers explanatory and clinical precision, while ancient philosophy reminds us that suffering is lived through in a social, existential, and relational world.

Jacobsen: How did earlier philosophers—particularly within Greek traditions—approach responding to these states? Did they advocate enduring them, or did they offer practical guidance for addressing conditions such as melancholia?

Sofocleous: We know of roughly eighteen ancient Cypriot philosophers, though in many cases only their names survive. One especially important figure here is Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism. Stoicism developed as a practical philosophy. It was meant to help people face ordinary difficulties, think more clearly, and live better. It was not simply a theory to admire from a distance. It was meant to shape character and conduct. That is part of the reason it still speaks to people today, and why some of its ideas have found their way into therapeutic settings.

The Stoic view is not that suffering should be brushed aside, nor that one should simply submit to it. It begins from the thought that suffering belongs to human life. No one escapes illness, loss, disappointment, grief, or uncertainty. The question, then, is not how to become invulnerable, but how to meet what happens without being destroyed by it. I think that is one reason Stoicism has remained compelling for so long.

Stoicism encourages people to treat adversity, where possible, as something from which one can learn. There is a well-known anecdote in Diogenes Laertius that Zeno turned to philosophy after losing his cargo in a shipwreck. As the story goes, he had been a merchant, and that loss brought him to Athens, where he studied with figures such as Crates the Cynic. Whether the story is fully historical or not, it captures something central to the Stoic outlook: misfortune can become a turning point rather than only an ending.

From that perspective, when something outside our control happens, whether illness, bereavement, failure, or some other hardship, the point is not simply to sit in despair. The point is to ask how one might respond with greater steadiness, better judgement, and a clearer sense of what really matters. Stoicism is always asking us to distinguish between what depends on us and what does not. We may not control events, but we can still work on our responses, our habits, and our values.

At the same time, I would not want to suggest that ancient philosophy somehow solves depression in the modern clinical sense. There are forms of severe depression in which a person cannot simply reason themselves into another state. So for me the value of Stoicism is not that it replaces psychological or medical treatment. Its value is that it offers a way of interpreting suffering without surrendering to helplessness. It can provide orientation, even when it cannot provide a cure.

Jacobsen: Thank you very much for the opportunity and your time, Angelos.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen is a blogger on Vocal with over 130 posts on the platform. He is the Founder and Publisher of In-Sight Publishing (ISBN: 978–1–0692343; 978–1–0673505) and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Interviews (ISSN: 2369–6885). He writes for International Policy Digest (ISSN: 2332–9416), The Humanist (Print: ISSN, 0018–7399; Online: ISSN, 2163–3576), Basic Income Earth Network (UK Registered Charity 1177066), Humanist Perspectives (ISSN: 1719–6337), A Further Inquiry (SubStack), Vocal, Medium, The Good Men Project, The New Enlightenment Project, The Washington Outsider, rabble.ca, and other media. His bibliography index can be found via the Jacobsen Bank at In-Sight Publishing,, comprising more than 10,000 articles, interviews, and republications across more than 200 outlets. He has served in national and international leadership roles within humanist and media organizations, held several academic fellowships, and currently serves on several boards. He is a member in good standing in numerous media organizations, including the Canadian Association of Journalists, PEN Canada (CRA: 88916 2541 RR0001), Reporters Without Borders (SIREN: 343 684 221/SIRET: 343 684 221 00041/EIN: 20–0708028), and others.