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http://positivetranceformations.com.au/blog/nothing-new-under-the-sun/ People in the past did have problems with depression and anxiety disorder and panic attacks. However, they tended to call them by different names. The combination of anxiety disorder and panic attacks tended to be lumped together as hysteria.
Citation preview
Learn About Depression in the
Past
positivetranceformations.com.au
Oddly enough, a lot of what we can learn
about depression in the past comes from
literature.
For some reason, a tendency towards melancholy often
seemed to be associated with the
ability to write well – it was part of the poetic
temperament.
Poet after poet wrote rather introspective works about what it felt like to be in the
black depths of melancholy or depression
.
Perhaps we could take a leaf out of their books and turn to
journaling as a form of self-expression and
therapy.
The list of poets who seemed to suffer from
depression in some form or other (at least if their poetic works
are anything to go by) reads like a list of the great authors of the English language:
John Donne, John Milton, John Keats, Percy Shelley, Lord
Byron, Gerald Manley Hopkins and possibly
even Samuel Coleridge as well.
However, you don’t have to be as good a poet as they were to benefit from getting
your feeling and thoughts out on paper.
The first major scientific work on
melancholy or depression was written
in 1621 by the philosopher Richard
Burton.
his work’s full title was the rather unwieldy “The Anatomy of
Melancholy: What it is, with all the Kinds, Causes, Symptoms, Prognostics & the
Several Cures of it,
in Three Partitions, with their Several
Sections, Numbers and Subsections,
Philosophically, Medicinally and
Historically Opened and Cut up”. We’ll call
it the Anatomy of Melancholy for short!
If you can handle the old-fashioned English and a few bits and pieces of
Latin (some of which are translated), then you can
read it for yourself at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10800/10800-h/10800-h.htm
.
This work investigates what we would call
depression, drawing on all branches of science
that were known at that time. It’s quite a big work – you have
been warned!
Some of the cures listed by Burton are
quite interesting.
In agreement with many modern thinkers, he claims that diet can
be used to treat melancholy and (in his terms) balance out
the bodily humours.
Some of the things that he suggests as
suitable items of diet include chicken,
mutton, wheat bread, plain water, apples
and oranges,
which is all very well, but he has a huge long list of forbidden foods that include a lot that doctors today would consider to be very healthy (cucumbers
and cabbage, for example).
He also suggested eating food in
moderation and in season, which today’s
naturopaths would agree with heartily.
Other cures include moderate exercise,
baths, fresh air and an active love life.
And the best sort of exercise, according to Burton, is exercise
that works the mind as well as the body
and is fun to do.
Music is also recommended to
ease a troubled mind, whether you play it or
listen to it. All good advice!
He also states that “Whosoever… shall
hope to cure this malady in himself or any other, must first
rectify these passions and perturbations of
the mind: the chiefest cure consists in them.
A quiet mind… is the only pleasure of the
world,” indicating that a troubled mind is one of the biggest caused
of depression (yes, they knew that back in
the 1600s!),
and suggests that people seek help by
getting rid of obsessive and negative thoughts – which is precisely the
sort of thing that hypnosis and hypnotherapy
try to do.
http://positivetranceformations.com.au