Depression, Catatonia, & 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.
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.