When Purging Melancholy Gave Way to Treating Depression
“The passions of melancholy doe more strongly worke in the minde of man, then doe those which come of any pleasant and delectable cause.” –from A Method unto Mortification, 1608.
First, to answer the question posed in the title and to make it clear that this is a linguistic, not a medical analysis. The changeover in printed literature actually happened around 1970, when “treat depression” began to appear more often than “purge melancholy”:
There are various caveats associated with Google NGrams data and you can dive into them if you like. What the graph makes reliably clear is that while writing about purging melancholy enjoyed several peaks and troughs in the 18th century before beginning a steady decline around 1820, treating depression became a talking point in literature around 1970 and shows no signs of stopping. Are we better off for this shift in perspective on our distress?
We take it for granted today that depression is a widespread phenomenon in Western societies and we now have an industry that purports to treat it, usually with drugs. Indeed, you would have to be living under a rock to be unaware that the medical and…
