From melancholia to depression : : disordered mood in nineteenth-century psychiatry / / Åsa Jansson.

• Superior document: Mental Health in Historical Perspective
• VerfasserIn: Jansson, Åsa.
• Place / Publishing House: Cham : : Springer International Publishing :, Imprint: Palgrave Macmillan,, 2021.
• Year of Publication: 2021
• Edition: First edition, 2021.
• Language: English
• Series: Mental Health in Historical Perspective.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (xv, 234 pages) :; digital, PDF file(s).

This open access book maps a crucial but neglected chapter in the history of psychiatry: how was melancholia transformed in the nineteenth century from traditional melancholy madness into a modern biomedical mood disorder, paving the way for the emergence of clinical depression as a psychiatric illness in the twentieth century? At a time when the prevalence of mood disorders and antidepressant consumption are at an all-time high, the need for a comprehensive historical understanding of how modern depressive illness came into being has never been more urgent. This book addresses a significant gap in existing scholarly literature on melancholia, depression, and mood disorders by offering a contextualised and critical perspective on the history of melancholia in the first decades of psychiatry, from the 1830s until the turn of the twentieth century.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Disordered Mood as Historical Problem -- 2. The Scientific Foundation of Disordered Mood -- 3. The Classification of Melancholia in Mid-Nineteenth-Century British Medicine -- 4. Melancholia and the New Biological Psychiatry -- 5. Statistics, Classification, and the Standardisation of Melancholia -- 6. Diagnosing Melancholia in the Victorian Asylum -- 7. Conclusion: Melancholia, Depression, and the Politics of Classification.