Depression, Catatonia, and Melancholia

Literature related to depression and melancholia spans centuries, and at different times, the medical community has referred to it by myriad different terms and sought to relieve its distress with just as many treatment approaches. Here, we seek to offer you information that spans more than the most recently-published findings, that includes a comprehensive understanding of humankind’s eons-long effort to understand and treat this potentially debilitating but highly treatable condition.

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Catatonia and Melancholia 101

Melancholia… was usurped by a noun with bland tonality and lacking any magisteria presence, used indifferently to describe an economic decline or a rat in the ground…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.

The Importance of Sleep

If our culture focused as much on sleep as our myths suggest it should, I probably wouldn’t have any patients. Out of all of the various treatments in psychiatry and neurology, from diet and exercise to supplements and medications, improving sleep is probably the most universal and consistent treatment available to patients, and one of the hardest.

Light Therapy

One of the most vital treatments in medicine is sleep regulation, and one of the most neglected components of sleep management is light management. Our brains evolved with many mechanisms to keep us highly functional during the day. At night, our brains don’t stop but they work even harder.