A short history of depression
Historically, depression is well documented. As Andrew Solomon notes, “It is fashionable to look at depression as a modern complaint, and this is a gross error” (p. 285). Our current medicated, alienated, cognitively obsessed style of depression is just one iteration in an endless variation on the same theme. It is a human condition, and one which interacts with culture in important ways. The social understanding of depression dictates in many ways the forms it takes. If born in the middle ages, your depression would most likely have been viewed (and experienced) as an illness of the soul brought about through sin; in the early 19th century, a madness needing institutionalization; and today, as a function of faulty neurochemistry.
The symptoms of depression are described with remarkable consistency from the time of Ancient Greece onward. The core features of depression - fear, sadness, despondency, despair and anxiety – have all been considered throughout the past few millennia in various ways and to varying degrees as part of normal emotional life. Thus many thinkers over time have wondered what delineates normal from abnormal emotional responses to life’s events. In any case, it is doubtful that a clear and distinct boundary exists to separate mental health from mental illness. William Styron notes that “the psychiatric literature on depression is enormous, with theory after theory concerning the disease’s etiology proliferating as richly as theories about the death of the dinosaurs or the origin of black holes” (p. 84). The truth is: we don’t know what causes depression.
Depression was historically known as melancholia. It has its roots in the Latin word Lugere, which means “to mourne”. Early writings provide the first known descriptions of melancholia as simply “fear or sadness that lasts a long time. The dawn of the Enlightenment throughout the seventeenth century ushered in a major shift within the Western mind. As science progressed, reason and rationality became the dominant mode of sense-making in the Western world. A objective, third-person way of seeing the world, so successful for the scientific endeavour, became the dominant framework for psychological investigation as well. Consequently, a reductionistic, materialistic understanding of mental health – melancholia included - emerged in which mind and body were split and in which the brain become the seat of all mental disturbance. This legacy endures as we continue to attempt to medicate our way out of our distress, which very little success.
Toward the end of the nineteenth century Freud relentlessly worked to understand and expose the human psyche. His insights influence all psychological thought to this day. In 1922 Freud published his famous essay Mourning and Melancholia. Freud wrote:
“The distinguishing features of melancholia are a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-reviling, and cultivates in a delusional expectation of punishment.”
The classic, mechanistic, Freudian description of depression became the dominant mode of understanding depression/melancholia, and although his psychoanalytic jargon is now out-dated, his description of melancholia remains lucid and clear.
Resources
Solomon, A. (2014). The noonday demon: An atlas of depression. Simon and Schuster.
Styron, W. (2010). Darkness visible: A memoir of madness. Open Road Media.
