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A History of Melancholia and Depression

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History of Psychiatry and Medical Psychology

Abstract

In the terms melancholia and depression and their cognates, we have well over two millennia of the Western world’s ways of referring to a goodly number of different dejected states. At any particular time during these many centuries the term that was in common use might have denoted a disease or a troublesome condition of sufficient severity and duration to be conceived of as a clinical entity; or it might have referred to a symptom within a cluster of symptoms that were thought to constitute a disease; or it might have been used to indicate a mood or emotional state of some duration, perhaps troublesome, certainly unusual, and yet not pathological, not a disease; or it might have referred to a temperament or type of character, involving a certain emotional tone and disposition, and yet not pathological; or it might have meant merely a feeling state of relatively short duration, unhappy in tone, but hardly a disease. Clearly the various states so denoted were unusual mental states, but they ranged over a far wider spectrum than that covered by the term “disease.”

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Notes and References

  1. For many aspects of this study, a more detailed account may be found in the author’s Melancholia and Depression: From Hippocratic Times to Modern Times (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988). As with that larger work, the author is indebted in ways beyond number to Joan K. Jackson, Ph.D.

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  1. Stanley W. Jackson
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  1. University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA

    Edwin R. Wallace IV MA, MD, MACPsych

  2. Randallstown, MD, USA

    John Gach

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Jackson, S.W. (2008). A History of Melancholia and Depression. In: Wallace, E.R., Gach, J. (eds) History of Psychiatry and Medical Psychology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-34708-0_14

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