Over 30% of all working people in Germany suffer from mental illness at some point in their lives, many of them from depression. The number of people affected is increasing, especially among young people. Mental illness is the most common cause of early retirement and the second most common reason for sick leave. The economic damage amounts to over 140 billion euros annually, about five percent of GDP. However, mental health continues to be an issue only when acute suffering already exists. Early detection and timely support are often lacking.

It is not only the body that can no longer keep up. As Prof. Dr. Dr. Thomas Fuchs showed in his lecture, it is often time itself that makes people ill, or more precisely, their relationship to time and the conflict between different time structures. For time is not a neutral structure. It is socially constructed, organized, regulated by institutions, and accelerated by technology. Modern societies function through temporal coordination, and synchronization is a prerequisite for communication.

In modern societies, time primarily appears as a functional structure: as linear time. It is planned, divided, and made available. This creates temporal orders that not only enable everyday processes, but also deeply influence our lifestyles. At the center is a linear logic of time based on acceleration and constant progress. This stands in tension with the cyclical structures of time that shape our rhythms of life. This conflict between linear and cyclical time is not merely abstract, but can be experienced concretely and felt physically. It becomes visible in depression.

Depression can therefore be understood as a chronopathological phenomenon. As an illness in which the experience of time itself is disturbed. What is described from a psychiatric point of view as listlessness, loss of interest, or inner emptiness can also be described as a dissolution of temporal experience. Those affected lose access to the future. The present becomes intangible. The past seems meaningless or burdensome. It is not just the mood that changes. It is the rhythm that becomes disconnected.

Particularly noticeable is the disconnection of physical rhythms. Sleep-wake cycles shift or break down. Feelings of hunger and satiety become irregular or lose their relevance. Social routines come to a standstill. Cyclical time loses its reliability. At the same time, no linear logic of time emerges. Purposeful action, planning, and hope become blurred or impossible. In depression, time continues to exist formally, but it loses its structure.

This destructuring cannot be viewed in isolation. It is related to the social order of time. Modern societies generate timing through technical acceleration, working hours, and digital communication structures. They demand availability, responsiveness, and efficiency. Interrupted or slowed-down time, for example due to illness or exhaustion, is not provided for. Cyclical rhythms are considered prone to disruption, biological limits are functionally transformed.

This creates a chronic conflict between cyclical lifetime, which needs repetition, retreat, and regeneration, and linear world time, a time that demands uninterrupted progress. Depression or burnout can be understood in the context of this conflict. Not as individual failure, but as a symptom of an overburdened time structure. It marks a point at which the body falls out of the socially expected time frame. Not because it wants to, but because it has to.

The coronavirus pandemic has further exposed this connection. Many cyclical structures, such as commutes, school hours, and social routines, have broken down. The familiar anchors of time dissolved without being replaced. For many people, this created a state in which neither cyclical nor linear time functioned. This is precisely where the chronopathological problem became apparent, because those who no longer have a synchronized external time and at the same time cannot maintain stable internal rhythms lose their connection to time as a whole and thus their connection to their social environment.

In the context of depression, this means that the illness is not only a psychological problem, but also a structural failure of time. The conflict between linear progress and cyclical withdrawal is not resolved, but exacerbated. Those who can no longer connect to linear time fall out of it – often before help can even take effect. Therapy places are scarce. Waiting times are significantly longer than what would be necessary in cases of acute loss of rhythm.

Peer support services, university and student initiatives, and other low-threshold services attempt to counteract this shortage.However, these forms of support are often weakly institutionalized and reach their limits due to staff and funding shortages. The use of AI as a substitute is controversial, and generally strongly discouraged. Quite simply, we are currently unable to help everyone. The demand is too high, and the number of places available is too small.

The answer to the problem of burnout and depression cannot be therapeutic alone. We need spaces where different time frames can be experienced. Time for breaks, for feedback, for cyclical regeneration. Without such breaks, the question of mental health will always remain incomplete. Time itself must be taken into account.