Arabic has four words for sadness. Philosophy explains why

As a PhD student researching mental health data among Arabic speakers, much of my time is spent analysing how they talk about emotional experience. I research, for example, YouTube comments and social media posts for how they express feelings associated with symptoms of depression and loneliness. I also study how grief, resistance and emotional life are rendered in classical Arabic poetry, from al-Mutanabbi in the 10th century to modernist poets such as Nizar Qabbani, as well as in novels like Naguib Maḥfūẓ’s Ḥaḍrat al-Muḥtaram (1975) and in psychoanalytic texts that move between Arabic and English. My scholarly research developed from my experience as a psychotherapist and from years of living, working, and travelling across Arab countries such as Jordan, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

My research involves sentiment analysis, a computational method that processes large volumes of text to classify emotional content as positive, negative or neutral. It also involves emotion annotation, which captures more specific emotional categories such as sadness, fear or anger. In my own work, this begins with manually reading through texts and labelling each one according to its emotional category. For researchers working across large collections of text, these methods are genuinely powerful. They can surface patterns across hundreds of thousands of comments, identify shifts in emotional tone over time, and provide instant outcomes. Annotation software helps streamline this process, making it possible to work efficiently across large datasets. In my own work, I have applied these methods to tens of thousands of Arabic social media comments across multiple platforms, studying topics such as expressions of trauma, loneliness during COVID-19, and gendered narratives of depression. But the more I worked with Arabic data, the more I noticed that something was being lost.

The words and phrases Arabic speakers use to describe their inner lives often cannot be reduced into simple ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ categorisations. They carry history, theology and phenomenological precision beyond the capabilities of sentiment analysis to capture. Let’s begin, for example, with a joke.

Mufalsaf (مفلسف) or mufalsafah (مفلسفة) is occasionally used in Arabic as a light-hearted way to refer to the person who turns an everyday conversation into a philosophical one. The terms refer back to falsafah (فلسفة), which means philosophy, with mufalsaf referring to males, and mufalsafah referring to females. In this usage, mufalsaf/mufalsafah is a way of teasing someone for turning a simple conversation into an existential one. Similarly, someone may say with a smiling tone: ‘Ma titfalsafi’ (ما تفلسفي), meaning do not philosophise, or with a slight sarcastic tone: ‘Ya faylasuf’ (يا فيلسوف), as in, oh, you are a philosopher.

Beneath these light-hearted jokes, there is the implication that suggests philosophical thought is somehow separate from our daily lives. This implied dichotomy is perhaps most evident in conversations about mental health. It’s a small but important matter because al-ḥal falsafah (الحل فلسفة), philosophising, is much more a part of the solution than the problem.

Arabic words for types of sadness, grief or distress are difficult to reduce to simple positives or negatives

When someone says ‘diq alsadr’ (ضيق الصدر), a term that was developed from the Quran describing the constriction of the heart and the spirit, they are expressing something that is physical, emotional and spiritual. In rough translation, it means a tightness or narrowing of the chest, but that rendering loses the theological weight of the phrase: the chest as the seat of consciousness and spiritual receptivity, and the narrowing as a condition of the whole inner person, not merely the body.

Similarly, Arabic words for types of sadness, grief or distress are difficult to reduce to simple positives or negatives. Take huzn (حزن) as an example. The word appears in the Quran, carried by the prophets, and in classical Arabic poetry as a mark of spiritual depth rather than weakness. To translate it simply as ‘sadness’ or even ‘grief’ is to strip it of that inheritance: huzn is oriented toward the past, toward a loss that has already occurred. By contrast, ghamm (غم) is felt in the present moment, an overwhelming suffocating weight so thick it covers the heart like a cloud. Ka‘aba (كآبة) is heavier still, a dejection so deep and prolonged it becomes visible on the face and body, a crushing of the spirit that the medieval Islamic scholar Ibn al-Qayyim described as distinct from both huzn and ghamm. Asaf (أسف) means sorrow filled with regret, but the two are not just synonyms for sadness. Each of these terms expresses a different type of experience. Each indicates a different type of relationship with suffering. They are not interchangeable.

In other words, choosing one word over another involves being precise with their description: ‘This is the exact form of what I’m holding.’ And when that level of precision is reduced to a facile label, it represents a significant loss of clinical understanding.

Classic Islamic psychology is a body of teachings developed by medieval scholars such as Ibn Sina, Ibn al-Qayyim and Al-Ghazali, who understood mental health in terms of the psychological, emotional and spiritual wellbeing of the whole person. In short, we need to take the falsafah joke seriously and change the answer: yes, I need a bit of philosophy. Philosophical thinking is not overthinking. Being mufalsaf/mufalsafah is in fact necessary to honour the complexity and richness of human experience. These medieval Muslim thinkers can help us today in many ways, and the resources they left us are rarely used.

Al-Kindi was born in Kufa in approximately 801 CE, and went on to study in Baghdad and become one of the most valuable thinkers of the Islamic Golden Age. He deservedly gained the title of the Philosopher of the Arabs. One of al-Kindi’s most famous writings is The Epistle on the Device for Dispelling Sorrows. This philosophical guide provides comfort for individuals experiencing psychological pain. According to al-Kindi, sorrow is defined as pain of the soul. Sorrow occurs when we lose something we love, or when we fail to obtain something we desire. Al-Kindi states that if we want something that cannot possibly exist, then we will never possess it. Therefore, unfulfilled desires lead to unhappiness. Since everything in the material world is transitory, believing that anything will last leads to endless suffering.

Al-Kindi’s advice aligns well with what we would now refer to as cognitive techniques

Instead, al-Kindi recommends that we train ourselves in good habits so that they eventually become second nature, a characteristic of our personality. The objective is not to eliminate desires; it is to direct our attachments to that which endures instead of that which is ephemeral. Thus, al-Kindi provides a practical method for coping with sorrow through internal transformation and adjusting our perspective rather than attempting to alter an ephemeral world.

There is nothing antiquated or naive about al-Kindi’s recommendations. His advice aligns well with what we would now refer to as cognitive techniques. The primary distinction between his approach and contemporary cognitive techniques is that he never divorced questions of psychological health from enquiries concerning meaning, virtue and human flourishing. Al-Kindi’s perspective is broader than most contemporary cognitive behavioural therapy, including the spiritual and philosophical life of the person.

As part of my recent research on Arabic trauma discourse, I compiled a corpus of more than 170,000 YouTube commentaries on videos pertaining to trauma, and examined 25,025 of them via several analytical lenses, including sentiment analysis and emotion annotation. It was from this research that I realised that Arabic speakers articulate emotional experiences that are often more nuanced and subtle than standard diagnostic categories. Many of the Arabic expressions that sentiment analysis coded as ‘sadness’, in reality represent a richer array of distinctive experiences. Huzn, ghamm, ka‘aba and other Arabic keywords of emotional experience have unique phenomenologies and resonances. Yes, simplification is sometimes necessary in both psychology and philosophy but some profound emotional experiences cannot be reduced to simple ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ emotions. For example, when a therapist or clinician understands diq alsadr as only anxiety with somatic manifestations, they may provide interventions aimed at alleviating symptoms without addressing the meanings. Diq alsadr conveys a theological and literary history as well as a specific view of the interconnection among spiritual conditionality and physical sensation. Islamic philosophy gives us ways to better understand the nature of these experiences.

Philosophy never divided individual psychology from concerns regarding virtue, meaning and community. This does not mean abandoning evidence-based treatments or contemporary neuroscience. It means epistemological pluralism; multiple knowledge systems in dialogue with each other. A therapist practising in Qatar, Lebanon or Iraq should be able to rely upon both contemporary protocols and the conceptual frameworks from philosophy. A researcher studying Arabic mental health discourse should be able to employ computational methodologies while also allowing philosophy to help make her more aware of her patient’s experiences.

We can’t go back to the 11th century and apply its frameworks to today’s struggles, but we can build upon and develop them

Reclaiming falsafah as a practice requires that we resist reductionism that distorts and homogenises. When a person expresses their huzn, we use the philosophical history of the term, recognising the characteristics of huzn that distinguish it from ghamm or ka‘aba. This is not pedantry; it is a matter of clarity.

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Some falsafah should be incorporated into the training of professionals. For researchers who are using computational methods to analyse the discourse around mental health in Arabic, falsafah provides a philosophically rigorous way to interpret results. Thus, falsafah offers us not only a powerful historical resource for the study of Arabic mental health, but also analytical tools to understand what the data actually means.

While we cannot go back to the 11th century and directly apply the frameworks developed then to today’s struggles, we can build upon and develop them. What would al-Kindi have said about the grief experienced by many Arabs as a result of the displacement and exile that defines so much of the current Arab experience? How might falsafah’s integrated psychology assist us in understanding the trauma experienced as physical suffering and also spiritual crisis?

For more than a millennium, Arab philosophers have articulated complex conceptual frameworks for understanding human psychological experience, emotional lives and self-knowledge, providing answers to actual questions about sorrow, anger and what constitutes a healthy soul.

Now is when we need these frameworks. Not as an alternative to current models, but as additional resources that may enhance our understanding of mental health within Arabic-speaking cultures. The conceptual tools exist: the vocabulary, the integrated frameworks, the philosophical perspectives. It is on us to reclaim them.

Perhaps the next time someone teases you for being mufalsaf/mufalsafah, you should emphatically claim it. Addressing mental health in ways that recognise the complexity of the Arabic experience, being mufalsaf/mufalsafah is not overthinking. It is thinking with sufficient care. That is not ostentation, it is our lives.