WINSTON'S DYSTHYMIA: UNDERSTANDING THE CONNECTION BETWEEN CHILDHOOD TRAUMA, WORKPLACE STRAIN, AND COMMUNITY LACK OF EMPATHY IN CHRONIC DEPRESSION.

Abstract

Background: Characters in George Orwell's novel "1984" have certain behavioral features which may be taken as pathological. We hypothesized that Winston Smith in particular suffers from chronic mild depression, which is a result of external pressure from the fictional dystopian society (i.e., multimodal stress of childhood trauma, workplace strain, disrupted close relationships, emotional deprivation, feeling of loneliness, and unempathetic community). To confirm the hypothesis, we conducted a number of analyses of the English text of the novel "1984".

Subjects and methods: Taking the full English text of "1984", we analyzed its fragments of first-person narrative, such as Winston's diary remarks and his speech during spoken communications as described in the novel. We then used the psycholinguistic method of clinical psycholinguistic analysis to analyze the text of Winston's diary from the perspective of psycholinguistic typology of literary texts based on emotional-semantic dominance as developed by the philologist Valery Belyanin (2000). The Belyanin method entailed placing a focus on the fragments of the first-person narratives representing descriptions of characters' emotions and feelings with subsequent determination of their type.

Results: In the first diary excerpt, Winston's writing consists of short, exclamatory phrases. He repeatedly uses the first-person singular pronouns and self-referential sentences, with simple and complex sentence structures. Lexical repetition is high, and emotional vocabulary emphasizes defiance and apathy. The second excerpt is purely declarative and reasoning-focused. It contains minimal stylistic markers, with present-tense verbs, no personal pronouns, and no emotional or figurative language. Key themes revolve around existential values, mortality, truth, and defiance against oppression. There is a notable absence of hedonic, familial, or self-realization themes, reinforcing a limited semantic focus aligned with existential distress. Winston Smith exhibits classic dysthymic markers, such as pervasive self-criticism, preoccupation with mortality, emotional heaviness, repetitive confessional style, and an undercurrent of hopeless defiance.

Conclusions: According to our psycholinguistic analysis of Winston Smiths' diary text and dialogues, his language reflects depressive processing of personal and life experiences, reduced semantic productivity, fragmented meanings, and an emotionally negative dominant tone. Application of the psycholinguistic diagnostic model for mild depression confirms that his diary entries exhibit pronounced markers of mild depression of the melancholic and astheno-hypodynamic types. This analysis affirms the psychological insight applied by the author in developing his characters.