PMID: 11624608Oct 20, 2001Paper

Depression's forgotten genealogy: notes towards a history of depression

History of Psychiatry
G Rousseau

Abstract

The history of depression remains unwritten, yet historians harbor plentiful assumptions about its pre-1800 past. These views are necessarily colored, even shaped, by modern views of depression formed after its nineteenth-century medicalization. A history of depression from ancient to modern times is an impossible task to complete successfully and would require, as a minimum, the historian's utmost vigilance to nuance, difference, and the inclusion of non-medical literature, especially poetry, drama and non-didactic prose. Nevertheless, five points about depression's pre-1800 European profile can confidently be made: (1) it developed along lines of female rather than male gender; (2) was transformed in the long eighteenth century when it blended with male madness under the sway of the cults of a pan-European sensibility movement; (3) always embedded a problematic pseudo-depressive state, or feigned version, which acted to permit female escape from dire socio-economic situation; (4) included sustained chronic duration as a requirement in its theory from the Renaissance forward; (5) is richly documented in its pre-1800 versions in imaginative literature, its often overlooked genealogy.

Citations

Jun 7, 2007·The Journal of Medical Humanities·Ilpo Helén
Oct 16, 2004·Social Science & Medicine·Ying-Yeh ChenIchiro Kawachi
Mar 31, 2018·The International Journal of Social Psychiatry·Sucharita Maji
Sep 3, 2002·The British Journal of Psychiatry : the Journal of Mental Science·T Bedirhan Ustün, Ron C Kessler
Oct 2, 2019·Current Neuropharmacology·Kaipuzha Venu AthiraSumana Chakravarty

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