Depression was initially called "
The term “depression” came into use in the 19th century, originally as “mental depression,” to describe lowering of spirits, and came to replace melancholia as a diagnosis.
During the 18th and 19th centuries, also called the Age of Enlightenment, depression came to be viewed as a weakness in temperament that was inherited and could not be changed. The result of these beliefs was that people with this condition should be shunned or locked up.
What we recognize today as depression was, in the Victorian era, popularly known as melancholia or melancholy. Like depression, melancholy ranged in seriousness from mild, temporary bouts of sadness or “low spirits” to longer, more extreme episodes, characterized by insomnia, lack of appetite, and suicidal thoughts.
The Great Depression (1929–1939) was an economic shock that impacted most countries across the world. It was a period of economic depression that became evident after a major fall in stock prices in the United States.
What Caused the Great Depression? Throughout the 1920s, the U.S. economy expanded rapidly, and the nation's total wealth more than doubled between 1920 and 1929, a period dubbed “the Roaring Twenties.”
By the 1950s, doctors favored artificial fever therapy and electroshock therapy. Describing the process of electroshock in 1957, a patient wrote: "Patients were generally on [electroshock] treatment twice a week--two days for the women (Mondays and Thursdays) and two days for the men (Tuesdays and Fridays).
Melancholia and melancholy had been used interchangeably until the 19th century, but the former came to refer to a pathological condition and the latter to a temperament. The term depression was derived from the Latin verb deprimere, "to press down".
During the short depression that lasted from 1920 to 1921, known as the Forgotten Depression, the U.S. stock market fell by nearly 50%, and corporate profits declined by over 90%. 1 The U.S. economy enjoyed robust growth during the rest of the decade.
People with mental problems during the 1800's were often called lunatics. They were placed in poorly run madhouses, jails, almshouses, and were harshly treated. In Europe, a method called moral management was created to treat the mentally ill with dignity and responsive care.
The pressures of survival and reproduction were high. Because of that, evolutionary psychologists believe that early humans did experience mental health issues like depression and anxiety.
From the 19th century into the 20th century, the terms used to diagnose generalized anxiety included “pantophobia” and “anxiety neurosis.” Such terms designated paroxysmal manifestations (panic attacks) as well as interparoxysmal phenomenology (the apprehensive mental state).
The ancient Romans and several Greek physicians thought depression was a mental disorder, caused by grief or blood and bile imbalances. The cure was exercise, music, hydrotherapy, or a primitive form of behavioral therapy, where good behavior was rewarded.
The contraction began in the United States and spread around the globe. The Depression was the longest and deepest downturn in the history of the United States and the modern industrial economy. The Great Depression began in August 1929, when the economic expansion of the Roaring Twenties came to an end.
Previous economic downturns were generally known as "panics," but Hoover deliberately chose the word depression because he thought it sounded less alarming, according to historian William Manchester in his book, The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972.
During the 1950s and 1960s, the popularity of the benzodiazepines stemmed from their effectiveness as remedies for general life stresses and protean conditions of anxiety, with little consideration of whether or not they treated explicit disease states.
From Middle English sad, from Old English sæd (“sated, full”), from Proto-Germanic *sadaz (“sated, satisfied”), from Proto-Indo-European *seh₂- (“to satiate, satisfy”).
Dysthymia. The symptoms of dysthymia (sometimes called Persistent Depressive Disorder) are similar to those of major depression, but are less severe and more persistent. A person has to have this milder depression for more than two years to be diagnosed with dysthymia.
Dysthymia is a milder, but long-lasting form of depression. It's also called persistent depressive disorder.
Between classical antiquity and modem psychiatry, there was an interval of centuries when the concept of anxiety as an illness seems to have disappeared from written records. Patients with anxiety did exist, but they were diagnosed with other diagnostic terms.
In the 19th century opium was recommended and held its ground well into the middle of our century. Various methods and drugs were recommended and used for the therapy of depression in the 19th century, such as baths and massage, ferrous iodide, arsenic, ergot, strophantin, and cinchona.
The Depression, set off by the October 1929 Wall Street stock market crash, hit the New South Wales economy with great severity. Unemployment, already high at 10% in mid 1929, was 21% by mid 1930 and rising, hitting almost 32% in mid-1932. Factory output fell almost 10% in 1929-30 and another 30% in 1930-31.
The 1930s (pronounced "nineteen-thirties" and commonly abbreviated as "the '30s" or "the Thirties") was a decade that began on January 1, 1930, and ended on December 31, 1939. In the United States, the Dust Bowl led to the nickname the "Dirty Thirties".
The 1950s are known as the Golden Age of Television by some people.