title: Depression's forgotten genealogy: notes towards a history of depression.
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.
authors.forename: G
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Rousseau
mesh_terms: D003863:Depression / Q000266:history*; D049690:History, Ancient; D049692:History, Early Modern 1451-1600; D049691:History, Medieval; D049711:History, Modern 1601-; D006801:Humans; D011570:Psychiatry / Q000266:history*