Essay Archive - Depression
Depression
Hundreds of years ago, humans were plagued with "crazy fear". Then the Greeks blamed an imbalance of black bile for the melancholia suffered by so many people. Centuries later, in a country where Prozac and PMS jokes are part of the cultural landscape, we have a new term for our "craziness", our melancholy-depression, or major depressive disorder. And along with our relatively newfound label, the heightened interest in depression has opened up a host of theories, myths, and treatments that seek to explain the oldest mental illness in written history.
Affecting over 17 million Americans each year (that's one in seven) and representing the n....
|