From Melancholia to Prozac

A History of Depression

Clark Lawlor

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

From Melancholia to Prozac

A History of Depression

Clark Lawlor

Description

Depression is an experience known to millions. But arguments rage on aspects of its definition and its 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 its 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.

From Melancholia to Prozac

A History of Depression

Clark Lawlor

From Melancholia to Prozac

A History of Depression

Clark Lawlor

Author Information

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.

From Melancholia to Prozac

A History of Depression

Clark Lawlor

Reviews and Awards

"From Melancholia to Prozac...offers a unique and insightful journey documenting the human struggle to define and treat depression from ancient Greece to modern times....Lawlor's text is well worth reading..."--International Social Science Review

From Melancholia to Prozac

A History of Depression

Clark Lawlor

From Our Blog

Imagining depression

"There was in him a mixture of that disease, the nature of which eludes the most minute enquiry, though the effects are well known to be a weariness of life, an unconcern about those things which agitate the greater part of mankind, and a general sensation of gloomy wretchedness."

Posted on January 18, 2012

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Achievement, depression, and politicians

'For two or three years the light faded from the picture. I did my work. I sat in the House of Commons, but black depression settled on me.' Starter for ten: who said this? (Apologies if you haven't watched University Challenge). It was Winston Churchill, arguably the greatest British prime minister and certainly one who played a crucial role in guiding his nation through the Second World War.

Posted on October 10, 2012

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