Melancholia

Melancholia (pronounced mel-uhn-koh-lee-uh or mel-uhn-kohl-yuh)

(1) A mental condition characterized by great depression of spirits and gloomy forebodings, apathy, and withdrawal.

(2) In clinical psychiatry, endogenous depression (and a former name for depression).

1685-1695: From the Late Latin melancholia, from the Ancient Greek medical term μελαγχολία (melankholía) (blackness of the bile), from μέλας (mélas), the construct being μελαν- (melan-) (black, dark, murky) + χολή (kholḗ) (bile).  In English it originally meant "mental condition characterized by great depression, sluggishness, and aversion to mental action" and over the years many synonyms emerged: discontent, pain, distress, agony, desolation, despondency, discomfort, grief, suffering, despair, torment, affliction, woe, anguish, sadness, depression, unhappiness, abjection, dreariness, dolefulness et al.

The noun melancholiac (person afflicted with melancholy, one who is affected with mental gloom) dates in the medical literature from 1819 though earlier in the same vein were melancholian (1630s), melancholist (1590s) & (most numerously) melancholic (1580s).  The adjective melancholic then was still defined as "containing black bile" reflecting the continued influence of the medical tests from antiquity, this construction from the Late Latin melancholicus, from the Greek melankholikos (choleric), from melankholia (sadness (literally "(excess of) black bile")).  To describe the habitually gloomy souls thought afflicted with melancholia, use began in 1789 (apparently unrelated to anything else happening at the time).  It replaced both the mid-fourteenth century adjective melancholian and survived (for a while), melancholiac which enjoyed a brief vogue during the mid-1800s.  The early fourteenth century noun melancholy (mental disorder characterized by sullenness, gloom, irritability, and propensity to causeless and violent anger) was from the Old French melancolie & malencolie (black bile; ill disposition, anger, annoyance), again borrowed from the Late Latin, source also of the Spanish melancolia, the Italian melancolia, the German Melancholie and the Danish melankoli.  The Old French variant malencolie (which existed also in Middle English) was formed by a false association with mal (sickness).

Moving on: Avoiding loneliness is recommended as a way of staving off feelings of melancholia.  Lindsay Lohan in spoof eHarmony dating advertisement, posted after splitting from former special friend Samantha Ronson, 2009.

The physicians from Antiquity attributed mental depression to unnatural or excess "black bile," a secretion of the spleen and one of the body's four "humors," which help form and nourish the body unless altered or present in excessive amounts. The word also was used in Middle English to mean "sorrow, gloom" (brought on by unrequited love, disappointment etc).  In antiquity it was a concept rather than something with a standardized systemization and there existed competing models with more or fewer components but it’s because the description with four was that endorsed by the Greek physician Hippocrates (circa 460–circa 370 BC) that it became famous in the West and absorbed into medical practice.  The four humors of Hippocratic medicine were (1) black bile (μέλαινα χολή (melaina chole)), (2) yellow bile (ξανθη χολή (xanthe chole)), (3) phlegm (φλέγμα (phlegma)) & (4) blood (αἷμα (haima)), each corresponding with the four temperaments of man and linked also to the four seasons: yellow Bile=summer, black bile=autumn, phlegm=winter & blood=spring.  Since antiquity, doctors and scholars wrote both theoretical and clinical works, the words melancholia and melancholy used interchangeably until the nineteenth century when the former came to refer to a pathological condition, the latter to a temperament.  Depression was derived from the Latin verb deprimere (to press down) and from the fourteenth century, "to depress" meant to subjugate or to bring down in spirits and by 1665 was applied to someone having "a great depression of spirit", Dr Johnson (Samuel Johnson, 1709-1784) using the word in a similar sense in 1753.  Later, the term came into use in physiology and economics.

What was for over two-thousand years known as melancholia came gradually to be called depression, a reclassification formalized in the mid-twentieth century when mental illness was subject to codification.  The first edition of the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM (1952)) included depressive reaction and the DSM-II (1968) added depressive neurosis, defined as an excessive reaction to internal conflict or an identifiable event, and also included a depressive type of manic-depressive psychosis within the category of Major Affective Disorders.  The term Major Depressive Disorder was introduced by a group of US clinicians in the mid-1970s and was incorporated into the DSM-III (1980).  Interestingly, the ancient idea of melancholia survives in modern medical literature in the notion of the melancholic subtype but, from the 1950s, the newly codified definitions of depression were widely accepted (although not without some dissent) and the nomenclature, with enhancements, continued in the DSM-IV (1994) and DSM-5 (2013)

Lululeika Ravn Liep (b 1998), 2015: An aesthetic of melancholia.

The cult of cultural and literary melancholia arose in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  It had the curious effect of transforming the notion of melancholia from a dreadful affliction to an indispensable adjunct of the artistic spirit; the persona of the troubled genius began here.  The phenomenon spread to Europe, best known in the German Sturm und Drang (literally "storm and drive" but more accurately translated as "storm and stress") movement (1760s-1780s) exemplified by the works of Goethe (Johann von Goethe, 1749–1832) and is an identifiable thread in the romantic movement of the nineteenth century.