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Melancholy Information

Melancholia (from Greek μελαγχολία - melancholia "sadness, lit. black bile"[1]), also lugubriousness, from the Latin lugere, to mourn; moroseness, from the Latin morosus, self-willed, fastidious habit; wistfulness, from old English wist: intent, or saturnine, (see Saturn), in contemporary usage, is a mood disorder of non-specific depression, characterized by low levels of both enthusiasm and eagerness for activity.

In a modern context, "melancholy" applies only to the mental or emotional symptoms of depression or despondency; historically, "melancholia" could be physical as well as mental, and melancholic conditions were classified as such by their common cause rather than by their properties.[2]

Similarly, melancholia in ancient usage also encompassed mental disorders which might now be classed as schizophrenias or bipolar disorders.

Contents

History

The name "melancholia" comes from the old medical belief of the four humours: disease or ailment being caused by an imbalance in one or other of the four basic bodily liquids, or humours. Personality types were similarly determined by the dominant humour in a particular person. According to Hippocrates, melancholia was caused by an excess of black bile,[3] hence the name, which means 'black bile', from Ancient Greek "μέλας" (melas), "dark, black",[4] + "χολή" (kholé), "bile";[5] a person whose constitution tended to have a preponderance of black bile had a melancholic disposition. See also: sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric.

Melancholia was described as a distinct disease with particular mental and physical symptoms in the fifth and fourth centuries BC. Hippocrates, in his Aphorisms, characterized all "fears and despondencies, if they last a long time" as being symptomatic of melancholia.[6]

In the medieval Arab world, the Arab psychologist Ishaq ibn Imran (d. 908), known as "Isaac" in the West, wrote an essay entitled Maqala fi-l-Malikhuliya, in which he discovered a type of melancholia: the "cerebral type" or "phrenitis". He carried out a diagnosis on this mental disorder, describing its varied symptoms. The main clinical features he identified were sudden movement, foolish acts, fear, delusions and hallucinations.[7][verification needed]

Ali ibn Abbas al-Majusi (d. 982) discussed mental illness in his medical encyclopedia, Kitab al-Malaki, which was translated into Latin as Liber pantegni, where he discovered and observed another type of melancholia: clinical lycanthropy, associated with certain personality disorders. He wrote the following on this particular type of melancholia: "Its victim behaves like a rooster and cries like a dog, the patient wanders among the tombs at night, his eyes are dark, his mouth is dry, the patient hardly ever recovers and the disease is hereditary."[7][verification needed]

In The Canon of Medicine (1020s), Avicenna dealt with neuropsychiatry and described a number of neuropsychiatric conditions, including melancholia.[8] He described melancholia as a depressive type of mood disorder in which the person may become suspicious and develop certain types of phobias.[9][verification needed] The Canon of Medicine was also translated into Latin in the 12th century.

In his study of French and Burgundian courtly culture, Johan Huizinga[10] noted that "at the close of the Middle Ages, a sombre melancholy weighs on people's souls." In chronicles, poems, sermons, even in legal documents, an immense sadness, a note of despair and a fashionable sense of suffering and deliquescence at the approaching end of times, suffuses court poets and chroniclers alike: Huizinga quotes instances in the ballads of Eustache Deschamps, "monotonous and gloomy variations of the same dismal theme", and in Georges Chastellain's prologue to his Burgundian chronicle,[11] and in the late fifteenth-century poetry of Jean Meschinot. Ideas of reflection and the workings of imagination are blended in the term merencolie, embodying for contemporaries "a tendency", observes Huizinga, "to identify all serious occupation of the mind with sadness".[12]

The most extended treatment of melancholia comes from Robert Burton, whose The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) treats the subject from both a literary and a medical perspective. Burton wrote in the 16th century that music and dance were critical in treating mental illness, especially melancholia.[13][14][15]

A famous allegorical engraving by Albrecht Dürer is entitled Melencolia I. This engraving portrays melancholia as the state of waiting for inspiration to strike, and not necessarily as a depressive affliction. Amongst other allegorical symbols, the picture includes a magic square, and a truncated rhombohedron.[2] The image in turn inspired a passage in The City of Dreadful Night by James Thomson (B.V.), and, a few years later, a sonnet by Edward Dowden.

Medical illness

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The present classification of psychiatric disorders is ill-defined, offering poor guidelines for the treatment of the ambulatory and the severe mentally ill. One form of depressive illness, described for millennia as melancholia, has defined criteria and effective treatments. In modern practice, melancholia is separated from the amorphous concepts of major depression, bipolar disorder, and other mood disorders.1 It is widely recognized in patients with severe mood disorder, especially among those with suicidal preoccupation and psychotic thoughts.

History: A syndrome of “madness” with “bodily causes” has long been clinically recognized.1 Except for two periods in Western history—the Middle Ages in Europe when church teachings dominated Western thought and in the 20th century when psychoanalytic notions usurped[citation needed] psychiatric thinking—melancholia was identified as a distinct periodic mood disorder with both manic and depressive phases, without progressive deterioration. It was associated with high fatality rates.2 Emil Kraepelin, the German psychopathologist, described an alternating mood disorder labeled manic-depressive insanity which he contrasted with a more malignant progressive dementia praecox.3 In 20th century classifications, psychoanalysts defined psychiatric illnesses as of “mental,” not of brain origin, with depressive and manic periods as “reactions” to personal experience. The classic example is the formulation by Adolf Meyer; his influence dominated the principal 20th Century psychiatric classifications, known as DSM-I and DSM-II.4

The introduction of the convulsive therapies in the 1930s and the antipsychotic and antidepressant drugs in the 1950s and 1960s found the psychiatric classification inadequate to identify which patients were best served by the available somatic, chemical, and verbal psychotherapies.1,3 Subsequent revisions of the nomenclature in 1980, based on committee concepts and not on evidence based medical criteria, listed 265 disorders increased to 295 in 1994.5,6 These classifications offered inadequate criteria to identify patients with definable disorders for which assured treatments could be recommended. Persons who feel saddened by life events or who are disgruntled and unhappy by virtue of life’s vicissitudes or by their personality traits meet criteria for major depression if their moods are associated with decreased energy or interest.1,5,6 Their inclusion within the class of major depression does not assure them adequate treatment and confounds the results of clinical treatment trials. Many respond to "placebo" interventions (biologically inactive though psychologically active).7

In the 1970s, interest in neuroendocrine gland products in psychiatric illness identified elevated serum cortisol (the hormone of the adrenal gland) as a specific marker for a melancholic, often psychotic, form of depressive illness.1,8-10 A formal test, the dexamethasone suppression test (DST) was found to be abnormal in melancholic depression, to revert to normal with adequate treatment, and to again become abnormal with relapse.1,8 By the end of the 20th century, melancholia was identified as a specific syndrome from among the subjects otherwise defined as suffering from mood disorders then labeled major depression or bipolar disorder.1,11

Melancholia defined. Severe mood disturbance (unremitting apprehension and sadness, suicide thoughts), psychomotor disturbance (agitation or bradykinesia), and vegetative signs are essential elements in defining melancholia. About one-third exhibit delusional thoughts.1,11 The onset is often acute, and associated with environmental events, such as loss of a spouse or child, pregnancy and delivery, or surgery. The course is variable, with patients remaining depressed for prolonged periods; exhibiting excited states and manic moods; alternating depression and mania. The illness has an unpredictable duration: it may be unremitting, or remit spontaneously, or fluctuate with periods of days, weeks or months.

The diagnosis of a melancholic depression is verified by abnormal neuroendocrine tests and disturbed sleep EEG measures.1,9,10 Hypercortisolemia is a prominent marker, particularly when the melancholic patient is agitated or psychotic.8-10 Similar findings, although less robust, are seen in thyroid function tests and sleep EEG measures.1 Although developed heuristically and without a central theory, these tests buttress the melancholia diagnosis. They are as useful (e.g. similar sensitivity and specificity) as are the EEG, brain imaging, and serum prolactin levels in defining a seizure disorder (Table 1).1 Onset rates of melancholic depression have also been specifically associated with low ambient temperature and sunlight (i.e. cold dark days) the month before the onset.[16]

Diagnostic criteria for melancholia1 (all must be present)

  1. An episode of illness characterized by an unremitting mood of apprehension and gloom that compromises normal daily activities that persists for at least two weeks.
  2. Psychomotor disturbance as agitation, retardation (including stupor and catatonia), or both.
  3. At least one of the following:

Applying these criteria to the individual entities described in the psychiatric classification finds patients with diverse syndromes meet the criteria for melancholia (Table 2).1 Patients with mood disorders who do not meet criteria for melancholia comprise a large heterogeneous population best labeled for the present as within the “non-melancholic mood disorders.” Table 2

Proposed inclusions in melancholia 1

Melancholia

Psychotic depression Manic-depression Puerperal depression Abnormal bereavement Depression with stupor or catatonia

Non-Melancholic Depression

Characterological depression Reactive depressive disorders Premenstrual dysphoria

The proposed criteria for melancholia have face validity for high specificity. They make false positive diagnoses unlikely, and maximize the identification of homogeneous population samples for clinical trials and studies of pathophysiology.

Treatment

Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT): The development of highly efficient antibiotics for bacterial infections and vitamin and hormone replacements for dietary and hormone deficiencies offered treatment response as validation of a clinical diagnosis.12 The astonishing efficacy of ECT in remitting melancholia supports the diagnosis. Melancholia remits with greater than 90% efficiency within three weeks with bilateral ECT.1,13-16

The multi-site collaborative ECT study of continuation ECT and continuation pharmacotherapy (known as CORE) used bilateral ECT in patients meeting rigorous criteria for unipolar major depression. They reported an overall remission rate of 87% among treatment completers, with an astonishing 95% rate for the 30% of patients identified as psychotic depressed.15,17 Although characterized as meeting criteria for major depression, the major part of the CORE sample meets the criteria for melancholia by the severity of the mood disorder, high incidence of psychosis and suicide risk, and their failure to respond to multiple medication trials.16-18 A post-hoc analysis of the rating scale items on the HAMD24, SCID, and IDS scales in these severely ill patients finds that more than 80% meet symptom criteria for melancholia.16

Lesser remission rates of 50% to 60% with ECT in hospitalized unipolar depressed patients are reported, but probably result from the use of unilateral electrode placement and inadequate energy dosing, examples of inefficient treatment methods.18 The efficacy of ECT is directly related to the clinician’s skills in diagnosis, selecting treatment frequency, technical parameters, managing concurrent medications, and continuation treatments.1,19 While patients with well defined melancholia, catatonia, and mania respond to ECT rapidly and well, those with such diagnoses as [major depression], depression secondary to substance abuse, dysthymia, and characterological forms of depression fare poorly.

Successful ECT also reverses the hormone imbalances seen in depressive illness.20 The same reversal in other hormone tests has been observed and these experiences are the basis for a neuroendocrine explanation of the mode of action of induced seizures in melancholia.13,21

Medications. Broad pharmacodynamic spectrum antidepressants are more effective in melancholic than in non-melancholic patients. Tricyclic antidepressants effectively relieve melancholic depression but do so less efficiently than ECT. The imbalance is seen in the relative inefficacy of TCA in psychotic melancholic patients where remission rates are low.1,22 The combination of classical antipsychotic agents (chlorpromazine, perphenazine) and tricyclic antidepressants were considered effective for the treatment of psychotic depression.23 The evidence for the use of SSRI and SNRI antidepressants and atypical antipsychotics is lacking.1,22,23

Lithium is effective moderating abnormal mood and reducing suicidal drive, and is the most effective augmenting agent in the treatment of acute depressive illness when the patient is melancholic. It is efficient as continuation therapy for melancholic patients, especially when combined with the tricyclic nortriptyline.1,15,22

Although the more recently induced SSRI antidepressants and similar agents are widely recommended as the first agents in treatment algorithms for major depression, their overall 30-40% remission rates differ only minimally from placebo rates.24 They are much less effective in hospitalized patients, those more likely to be suffering from melancholic depression. These experiences speak against their use in melancholia.

Psychotherapy. No form of psychotherapy has been shown to be effective in the treatment of melancholic depression.23 Yet, the fluctuations in severity of melancholia enable some clinicians to offer psychotherapy with or without supplementary medication waiting for the natural course of illness to improve the condition.

Brain stimulation. As of May 2009, none of the newly introduced brain stimulation methods, notably transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), vagus nerve stimulation (VNS), surgical deep brain stimulation (DBS), or magnetic seizure therapy (MST) has demonstrated efficacy in relieving melancholia.

Unipolar-bipolar distinction. Patients with mood disorder are now dichotomized by a history of manic or hypomanic episodes into recurrent depressive or bipolar disorder.5,6,22 When depressive illness is grouped by criteria of melancholia, however, the unipolar/bipolar dichotomy fails. No characteristic psychopathology separates the melancholic patient with a history of mania or hypomania from one without such a history.1,23 The illnesses are commonly recurrent and in succeeding episodes 70% of patients initially classified as bipolar disorder meet criteria for major depression; and, in the course of a major depressive illness, 10% exhibit episodes of mania and over half features of mania when depressed.1,22

Conclusion The present classification of mood disorders is arbitrary, divided into a multitude of presumed disorders with imprecise criteria. The formulations are not helpful in selecting effective treatment. Melancholia is a distinct medical syndrome that is defined by symptoms, signs and course of illness, verified by laboratory tests, and validated by effective treatment. It is distinguished from other depressive mood disorders by its characteristic psychopathology. The unipolar/bipolar dichotomy is not supported when the criteria for melancholia are used to classify depressive illness. The treatment algorithm for melancholia differs from that of non-melancholic depressions, but the treatment algorithms for melancholia with or without mania are similar.1,11,22,23

Hypercortisolemia is characteristic of severely ill depressed patients, and tests of this hormone (and other hormones) should be considered in the classification and the management of patients with depressive mood disorders.1,8-10,25 Various treatments—lithium, tricyclic antidepressants, and ECT – effectively relieve the depressive and the manic phases of the syndrome when properly applied. Psychotherapy and brain stimulation methods are best avoided. The expert treatment algorithms require substantial revision if they are to claim that they are “evidence-based”.

Cult of melancholia

During the early 17th century, a curious cultural and literary cult of melancholia arose in England. It was believed that religious uncertainties caused by the English Reformation and a greater attention being paid to issues of sin, damnation, and salvation, led to this effect.

In music, the post-Elizabethan cult of melancholia is associated with John Dowland, whose motto was Semper Dowland, semper dolens. ("Always Dowland, always mourning.") The melancholy man, known to contemporaries as a "malcontent," is epitomized by Shakespeare's Prince Hamlet, the "Melancholy Dane."

Another literary expression of this cultural mood comes from the death-obsessed later works of John Donne. Other major melancholic authors include Sir Thomas Browne, and Jeremy Taylor, whose Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial and Holy Living and Holy Dying, respectively, contain extensive meditations on death.

A similar phenomenon, though not under the same name, occurred during Romanticism, with such works as The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe or Ode on Melancholy by John Keats. In the 20th century, much of the counterculture of modernism was fueled by comparable alienation and a sense of purposelessness called "anomie"; earlier artistic preoccupation with death has gone under the rubric of memento mori.

In Islam

The Arabic word found as ḥuzn and ḥazan in the Qur'an and hüzün in modern Turkish refers to the pain and sorrow over a loss, death of relatives in the case of the Qur'an. Two schools further interpreted this feeling. The first sees it as a sign that one is too attached to the material world, while Sufism took it to represent a feeling of personal insufficiency, that one was not getting close enough to God and did not or could not do enough for God in this world.[17] The Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk in the book Istanbul: Memories of a City[17] further elaborates on the added meaning hüzün has acquired in modern Turkish. It has come to denote a sense of failure in life, lack of initiative and to retreat into oneself, symptoms quite similar to melancholia. According to Pamuk it was a defining character of cultural works from Istanbul after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. One may see similarities with how melancholic romantic paintings in the west sometimes used ruins from the age of the Roman Empire as a backdrop.

As a parallel with physicians of classical Greece, ancient Arabic physicians and psychologists also categorized ḥuzn as a disease. Al-Kindi (c. 801–873 CE) links it with disease-like mental states like anger, passion, hatred and depression, while Avicenna (980–1037 CE) diagnosed ḥuzn in a lovesick man if his pulse increased drastically when the name of the girl he loved was spoken.[18] Avicenna suggests, in remarkable similarity with Robert Burton, many causes for melancholy, including the fear of death, intrigues surrounding one's life, and lost love. As remedies, he recommends treatments addressing both the medical and philosophical sources of the melancholy, including rational thought, morale, discipline, fasting and coming to terms with the catastrophe.

The various uses of ḥuzn and hüzün thus describe melancholy from a certain vantage point, show similarities with Female hysteria in the case of Avicenna's patient and in a religious context it is not unlike sloth, which by Dante was defined as "failure to love God with all one's heart, all one's mind and all one's soul". Thomas Aquinas described sloth as "an oppressive sorrow, which, to wit, so weighs upon man's mind, that he wants to do nothing".[19]

See also

Footnotes

  1. ^ μελαγχολία, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, on Perseus Digital Library
  2. ^ G E Berrios (1988) Melancholia and depression during the 19th century. A conceptual History. British Journal of Psychiatry 153: 298-304
  3. ^ Hippocrates,De aere aquis et locis, 10.103, on Perseus Digital Library
  4. ^ μέλας, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, on Perseus Digital Library
  5. ^ χολή, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, on Perseus Digital Library
  6. ^ Hippocrates, Aphorisms, Section 6.23
  7. ^ a b Hanafy A. Youssef, Fatma A. Youssef and T. R. Dening (1996), "Evidence for the existence of schizophrenia in medieval Islamic society", History of Psychiatry 7: 55-62 [56].
  8. ^ S Safavi-Abbasi, LBC Brasiliense, RK Workman (2007), "The fate of medical knowledge and the neurosciences during the time of Genghis Khan and the Mongolian Empire", Neurosurgical Focus 23 (1), E13, p. 3.
  9. ^ Amber Haque (2004), "Psychology from Islamic Perspective: Contributions of Early Muslim Scholars and Challenges to Contemporary Muslim Psychologists", Journal of Religion and Health 43 (4): 357-377 [366].
  10. ^ Huizinga, "Pessimism and the ideal of the sublime life", The Waning of the Middle Ages, 1924:22ff.
  11. ^ "I, man of sadness, born in an eclipse of darkness, and thick fogs of lamentation".
  12. ^ Huizinga 1924:25.
  13. ^ Cf. The Anatomy of Melancholy, subsection 3, on and after line 3480, "Music a Remedy":

    But to leave all declamatory speeches in praise [3481]of divine music, I will confine myself to my proper subject: besides that excellent power it hath to expel many other diseases, it is a sovereign remedy against [3482] despair and melancholy, and will drive away the devil himself. Canus, a Rhodian fiddler, in [3483]Philostratus, when Apollonius was inquisitive to know what he could do with his pipe, told him, "That he would make a melancholy man merry, and him that was merry much merrier than before, a lover more enamoured, a religious man more devout." Ismenias the Theban, [3484]Chiron the centaur, is said to have cured this and many other diseases by music alone: as now they do those, saith [3485]Bodine, that are troubled with St. Vitus's Bedlam dance. [1]

  14. ^ "Humanities are the Hormones: A Tarantella Comes to Newfoundland. What should we do about it?" by Dr. John Crellin, Munmed, newsletter of the Faculty of Medicine, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1996.
  15. ^ Aung, Steven K.H., Lee, Mathew H.M. (2004). "Music, Sounds, Medicine, and Meditation: An Integrative Approach to the Healing Arts". Alternative & Complementary Therapies 10 (5): 266–270. doi:10.1089/act.2004.10.266. http://www.liebertonline.com/doi/abs/10.1089/act.2004.10.266?journalCode=act.
  16. ^ J Radua et al (2010) Climatic relationships with specific clinical subtypes of depression. Psychiatry Research 175(3): 217-220
  17. ^ a b 'Istanbul', chapter 10, (2003) Orhan Pamuk
  18. ^ Avicenna, Fi'l-Ḥuzn, (About Ḥuzn)
  19. ^ "Summa Theologica", Thomas Aquinas

Other notes

References

External links

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'Melancholy' Definition

Adjective

melancholy (comparative more melancholy, superlative most melancholy)
  1. Affected with great sadness or depression.
Synonyms
from: Wiktionary: melancholy,
Tue May 22 16:26:41 2012
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