High-Functioning Depression: When ‘Killing It’ Is Killing You
Have you ever heard of high-functioning depression?
It sounds like a paradox, how can you be thriving and falling apart at the same time? I used to think depression meant less drive, less productivity. But Dr. Judith Joseph turned that idea on its head, and once you hear her story, you’ll see why.
Judith isn’t just any psychiatrist. She’s advised the NIH and World Health Organisation, and coined the term high-functioning depression from her own lived experience. During her divorce, she was more productive than ever awards, milestones, and accolades. From the outside, she looked unstoppable. Inside, she was empty. In her words: “I wasn’t killing it, it was killing me.”
That experience became the seed of her work on high-functioning depression: why so many of us who never stop, never slow down, often feel the most depleted.
In our five-question pre-interview, Judith shared things that really stayed with me:
Why she built a “happiness lab” for herself and what actually brings her joy
How the biggest resistance in her life hasn’t come from other people, but from ignoring her own body and invalidating her needs.
The moment she reframed food from calories to brain fuel, and how that simple shift transformed her stress, sleep, and even stopped her grinding her teeth at night.
And the day she finally let go of perfectionism after her divorce, a moment she described as feeling “like an angel had touched me.”
This is Judith's journey into what ‘functioning well’ really looks like.
And if I’m honest, this is the part I love most, because this is where you stop seeing a guest title, and you start seeing the human being in front of me.
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What's one small thing about you that makes you, uniquely you?
Well, I have a lab, and the lab’s motto is “understand the science of your happiness.” Every single day, I use science to think about how to incorporate more joy into my life - based on evidence-based research and it’s really difficult for me to break away from that.
Definitely connection. I come from a big family and I’m one of four siblings. As a therapist and psychiatrist, I realised early on that working alone in private practice wasn’t for me because I need to be around people. So I decided early in my career that I was going to have a practice with a whole team of mental health specialists and researchers. Now I have this lab where I work with 10 other people and I love it.
