Abstract
This chapter traces the history of depression back to Greek Hippocratic medicine. An unbalance of the humours constituting the human body, with a prevalence of black bile , was associated with the low mood condition thus called “melancholia”. This view also led to the development of treatments such as emetics and cathartics , and of widespread bloodletting . Radical evolutions occurred with the foundation of modern psychiatry and the classification of mental diseases by Emil Kraepelin , and with psychoanalysis and the concepts of neurosis and psychodynamic depressive adaptation to life events provided by Sigmund Freud . Depression dramatically changed with the changes in the organisation of society and medicine; its manifestations, causes and prevalence fundamentally depend on the nature of the diagnostic criteria, whose evolution are analysed in detail in this chapter.
Though the doctors treated him, let his blood, and gave him medications to drink, he nevertheless recovered.
Leo Tolstoy
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Giraldi, T. (2017). Melancholy and Depression. In: Unhappiness, Sadness and 'Depression'. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57657-2_2
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