Research

My research sits mainly at the intersection of phenomenology, philosophy of psychiatry and philosophy of mind. I am interested in how experiences of depression and grief can reorganise a person’s relation to others and to the world. How can depression leave someone feeling like a spectator of interpersonal life, able to understand others without fully participating in a shared world? What does it mean to experience the world as ‘unhomelike’, or to become ‘detuned’ from the people and possibilities around us? In grief, how does the death of another person alter the temporal, interpersonal and worldly structures through which that relationship was lived? And when these experiences resist literal description, what can the metaphors used to express them reveal about their structure?

One strand of my research concerns the lived experience of depression. My doctoral work focused particularly on disruptions in interpersonal relationships: how can depression leave someone cut off from shared situations, or able to understand others without feeling fully involved with them? My subsequent research has examined altered attunement, unhomelikeness and temporality, as well as whether psychiatric descriptions adequately capture these dimensions of experience. A second strand concerns grief and bereavement. In my current postdoctoral research, I ask how the death of another person can disrupt temporal and interpersonal experience, and how these disruptions reshape a bereaved person’s relation to the world.

I am also increasingly interested in metaphor as a philosophical and phenomenological resource. When someone describes depression as being trapped, grief as carrying a weight, or another person as suddenly distant, what does the metaphor reveal about the experience? Can recurring metaphors disclose relations between temporality, embodiment, interpersonal life and worldhood that might otherwise remain obscure? My work explores how the analysis of first-person metaphorical language can contribute to our understanding of depression, grief and other difficult-to-articulate experiences.

Publications

Published

Sofocleous, A. (2023). Depression and mindfulness: Reclaiming the past, present, and future. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 65(2), 328–350. https://doi.org/10.1177/00221678231197870
Sofocleous, A. (2025). Major depressive disorder: From accurate diagnosis to effective treatment. Journal of Humanistic Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1177/00221678251385600

In Press

Sofocleous, A. Experiences of depression as being ‘differently attuned’ to the world. In F. Brencio & F. Greco (Eds.), Heidegger and Neuroscience: Ontology, Medicine and Psychoanalysis in Dialogue. Routledge.
Sofocleous, A. Νικαγόρας ο Κύπριος (Nicagoras of Cyprus). Annual Review of the Cyprus Research Centre of the Cyprus Ministry of Education, Sport and Youth, Volume XL.
Sofocleous, A. Understanding metaphors of depression in the work of David Foster Wallace. In J. McCurry (Ed.), Palgrave Handbook of Phenomenology and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan.