From Melancholia to Prozac

A history of depression
1. Auflage 2012
ISBN: 978-0-19-958579-3
Verlag: Oxford University Press

Buch, Englisch, 288 Seiten, Format (B × H): 135 mm x 203 mm, Gewicht: 404 g

A fascinating cultural exploration of the history of depression and melancholy
Demontrates the changing nature of the condition - it was viewed at various periods as fashionable and a malady of the elite, as closely linked with insanity, and now as a purely biochemical condition
Engages with contemporary debates relating to diagnosis and treatment, such as the use of drugs or behavioural therapies

Depression is an experience known to millions. But arguments rage on aspects of ist definition and ist impact on societies present and past: do drugs work, or are they merely placebos? Is the depression we have today merely a construct of the pharmaceutical industry? Is depression under- or over-diagnosed? Should we be paying for expensive 'talking cure' treatments like psychoanalysis or Cognitive Behavioural Therapy?

Here, Clark Lawlor argues that understanding the history of depression is important to understanding ist present conflicted status and definition. While it is true that our modern understanding of the word 'depression' was formed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the condition was originally known as melancholia, and characterised by core symptoms of chronic causeless sadness and fear. Beginning in the Classical period, and moving on to the present, Lawlor shows both continuities and discontinuities in the understanding of what we now call depression, and in the way it has been represented in literature and art. Different cultures defined and constructed melancholy and depression in ways sometimes so different as to be almost unrecognisable.

Even the present is still a dynamic history, in the sense that the 'new' form of depression, defined in the 1980s and treated by drugs like Prozac, is under attack by many theories that reject the biomedical model and demand a more humanistic idea of depression - one that perhaps returns us to a form of melancholy.

Zielgruppe

Readers of popular science and those interested in the history of medicine and depression

Autoren/Hrsg.

Lawlor, Clark

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Psychologie Psychotherapie / Klinische Psychologie
• Medizin | Veterinärmedizin Medizin | Public Health | Pharmazie | Zahnmedizin Medizin, Gesundheitswesen Medizin, Gesundheit: Sachbuch, Ratgeber
• Medizin | Veterinärmedizin Medizin | Public Health | Pharmazie | Zahnmedizin Medizinische Fachgebiete Psychiatrie, Sozialpsychiatrie, Suchttherapie
• Medizin | Veterinärmedizin Medizin | Public Health | Pharmazie | Zahnmedizin Medizin, Gesundheitswesen Geschichte der Medizin

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Prologue: Dr Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
1: 'Poor Wretch'
2: Genius and Despair
3: From Spleen to Sensibility
4: Victorians, Melancholia, and Neurasthenia
5: Modernism, Melancholia, and Depression
6: The New Depression
7: 'The Drugs Don't Work'? The Future for Depression and Melancholia

Über Autor(innen)

Lawlor, Clark
Clark Lawlor is Reader in English Literature at Northumbria University, and is especially interested in the cultural history of disease. He has been publishing work on the history and representation of depression recently, partly as a result of his co-Directorship of Before Depression, a Leverhulme Trust-funded project on the nature of depression in the eighteenth century. Before his interest in depression he published Consumption and Literature: The Making of the Romantic Disease (2006), which describes how consumption (tuberculosis) came to be such a glamorous disease by the nineteenth century.