From Melancholia to Depression
Subtitle: Disordered Mood in Nineteenth-Century Psychiatry
Publisher: Springer Nature
Published: 2021
Language: eng
Number of pages: 234
ISBN-13: 9783030548025
Subjects: Psychiatry; Social & cultural history; History of medicine; British & Irish history
Description: This open access book maps a crucial but neglected chapter in the history of psychiatry: how was melancholia transformed in the nineteenth century from traditional melancholy madness into a modern biomedical mood disorder, paving the way for the emergence of clinical depression as a psychiatric illness in the twentieth century? At a time when the prevalence of mood disorders and antidepressant consumption are at an all-time high, the need for a comprehensive historical understanding of how modern depressive illness came into being has never been more urgent. This book addresses a significant gap in existing scholarly literature on melancholia, depression, and mood disorders by offering a contextualised and critical perspective on the history of melancholia in the first decades of psychiatry, from the 1830s until the turn of the twentieth century.
Notes: Open Access Unrestricted online access

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