Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of patient vignettes
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Melancholia: a conceptual history
- 2 Melancholia defined
- 3 Defining melancholia by psychopathology
- 4 Defining melancholia: laboratory tests
- 5 Examination for melancholia
- 6 The differential diagnosis of melancholia
- 7 Suicide in melancholia
- 8 Electroconvulsive therapy for melancholia
- 9 Achieving effective ECT
- 10 The validity of the pharmacotherapy literature in melancholia
- 11 Basic pharmacotherapy for melancholic patients
- 12 Pharmacotherapy for melancholic patients in complicating circumstances
- 13 Proposed treatments for melancholia
- 14 The pathophysiology of melancholia
- 15 Future directions
- References
- Index
1 - Melancholia: a conceptual history
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 August 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of patient vignettes
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Melancholia: a conceptual history
- 2 Melancholia defined
- 3 Defining melancholia by psychopathology
- 4 Defining melancholia: laboratory tests
- 5 Examination for melancholia
- 6 The differential diagnosis of melancholia
- 7 Suicide in melancholia
- 8 Electroconvulsive therapy for melancholia
- 9 Achieving effective ECT
- 10 The validity of the pharmacotherapy literature in melancholia
- 11 Basic pharmacotherapy for melancholic patients
- 12 Pharmacotherapy for melancholic patients in complicating circumstances
- 13 Proposed treatments for melancholia
- 14 The pathophysiology of melancholia
- 15 Future directions
- References
- Index
Summary
Depression, most people know, used to be termed “melancholia”… Melancholia would still appear to be a far more apt and evocative word for the blacker forms of the disorder, but it was usurped by a noun with a bland tonality and lacking any magisterial presence, used indifferently to describe an economic decline or a rut in the ground, a true wimp of a word for such a major illness …
The Swiss-born psychiatrist Adolf Meyer had a tin ear for the finer rhythms of English and therefore was unaware of the semantic damage he had inflicted by offering “depression” as a descriptive noun for such a dreadful and raging disease. Nonetheless, for over seventy-five years the word has slithered innocuously through the language like a slug, leaving little trace of its intrinsic malevolence and preventing, by its very insipidity, a general awareness of the horrible intensity of the disease when out of control.
A scientific classification of behavior disorders is still an unreachable goal. The efforts in the past two centuries are reminiscent of the many attempts to bring order into the universe of plants and animals before the singular rules of Linnaeus and Mendel allowed meaningful classifications to emerge. The maladaptive variations in human mood, thought, and motor behavior observed over the millennia offer a myriad of images that have captured the attention of one observer or another who attempted to formulate these observations into an understandable framework.
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- MelancholiaThe Diagnosis, Pathophysiology and Treatment of Depressive Illness, pp. 1 - 14Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006