Homo melancholichus: why depression has been chasing us for centuries

• Trankimazin Spain: Anxiety is the latest epidemic

Hippocrates defined it as a prolonged feeling of fear and sadness. «The patient seems to have like a thorn stuck in the viscera; is prey to nausea, flees from light and men, loves darkness and is attacked by fear, ”reads the Hippocratic Treaties .

For Aristotle it was the effect of an excess of "black bile" on the body, but it also stressed that almost all extraordinary men had suffered it. And for Freud it was the "painful emotional state" par excellence.

We talk about melancholy, anguish, heartburn, ill of living , existential weariness, tristitia , anxiety, taedium vitae or, as it is called now, depression ... A condition that according to the World Health Organization is destined to become the great humanity's disease, ahead of cancer, and why in 2019 more than two million people were already receiving treatment in Spain.

We think it is a current evil, a pathology of our times. But what's up ... The melancholy is as old as man . The human being is, in fact and always, homo melancholicus .

«It comes from afar, although at certain times it has been felt with greater definition: during the Renaissance and the Baroque, in the century called the Lights, with the advent of Romanticism, in the years of the end of siècle , in the time that preceded and in which he followed the two world wars and in our time, ”says Xavier Roca-Ferrer , writer, editor, translator and author of The Anxious Monkey (Harp editorial), a delicious book that traces a historical biography of anguish and of the numerous philosophical, artistic, literary and musical works that he has inspired.

Lucretius, Cioran, Schopenhauer, Michelangelo, Victor Hugo, Emile Zola ... Endless lucid spirits have felt sadness and disgust of living. Because when the human being begins to think, to look for meaning in existence, he falls into his arms. In fact, for centuries melancholy was an elitist evil that seized the most educated and well-off layers of society. But with progress and improvement in living conditions, the evil of living democratized and the number of people affected skyrocketed. It ceased to be the heritage of intellectuals, artists and idle ladies to affect anyone.

Because existing, has always existed. Many scholars consider, for example, that cave paintings are the result of this anguish and that by representing in the caves bison and other animals prehistoric men tried to conjure the hunt and exorcise the fear of starvation.

Vice takes a thousand forms and a single result: man feels tired of himself

Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, in ancient Mesopotamia, and who is considered to have reigned sometime between 2650 and 2750 BC, was the first great distress in history that left that evil documented. He did it in a long poem in which he reveals the desire he feels at the idea of ​​dying. But not only someone like Gilgamesh, who had everything, suffered that existential distress. Also an Egyptian scribe who lived about 4,000 years ago recorded it in a papyrus that is preserved in Berlin: «Death is my only hope today, / As the cure for the sick, As freedom for the prisoner ...» .

The Greek philosophers and doctors of the fifth century BC were the first to study and meditate on it. Aristotle , the first to claim its value as an artistic and creative engine. And, from the Greek world, it passed to the Roman. To the point that, as of the first century, a genuine existential melancholy, a kind of epidemic, taedium vitae took hold of the educated (and idle) classes of the Roman world. Seneca put on record of him: «Vice takes a thousand forms and only one result: man feels tired of himself. This leads to an imbalance in the spirit, to a dissatisfaction of desires, ”says Tranquillitate Animi . And he does not hesitate to recommend suicide when life becomes unbearable.

With Christianity comes the demonization of melancholy. At the end of the fourth century the Church begins to use the term "acedia" to refer to a series of feelings and behaviors that he considers undesirable and that the priest, ascetic and father of the Juan Casiano Church (c. 360-435) defines as a "Fatigue or affliction of the heart" similar to "unease or despondency" and "especially torture for loners."

In the Middle Ages, Acedia was considered one of the eight main temptations and wreaked havoc on monastic life, although it was later extended to the laity. Subsequently, it became the deadly sin of laziness.

«What I have seen in numerous people afflicted with this evil makes me repeat that I do not know any other remedy that is not to avoid any means that can be tamed. If words are not enough, we must resort to punishments; and if the slight punishments are useless, we must resort to the great ones ”, sentence Teresa de Ávila (1515-1582) in its Foundation of the Carmelite monastery of Medina del Campo regarding how to treat the novices who are dragged by that devilish melancholia.

But in the Renaissance, sadness is once again claimed and dignified by the most educated and sensitive citizens. "Partly thanks to the rereading of the texts of antiquity," emphasizes Roca-Ferrer.

The idea that there is an essential relationship between melancholy and genius flourishes in the Renaissance and creeks in the following centuries: Shakespeare, Donne, Burton , Jansenists, English pre-Romantics, Rousseau , French romantics, nineteenth-century Central European philosophers such as Kierkegaard or Nietzsche, Freud or Heidegger contemplate it that way.

This evil torments me endlessly day and night. I lack the light, I live only on the night of Tartarus, I feel like dead

In fact, from the 16th century on, depression becomes an obligatory temperament of any intellectual worth his salt. Petrarca was probably the first to feel that poetic melancholy. «This evil torments me endlessly day and night. I lack the light, I live only on the night of Tartarus, I feel like dead, but the worst of all is that these tears and sufferings give me pleasure and I have a hard time turning away from them, ”he writes in 1347 in his Secretum , returning to the melancholy their status of temperament typical of exceptional beings, of high souls.

The books on the subject then begin to appear in dozens. Dürer realizes in 1514 his engraving Melancholy I , Cranach the Elder (1472-1553) executes at least four allegories on table. Representing melancholy will soon become a new genus, the vanitas , which highlights the emptiness of life and the relevance of death through symbols such as skulls, decaying fruits or musty flowers and that will have enormous success until the middle of the century XVIII.

But the weariness has continued for centuries feeding art. What to say about The Scream of Munch, a work that symbolizes a modern man caught in a moment of deep anguish and existential despair. Tanguy, Dalí, Magritte or Delvaux also reflected in their paintings the anguish. And El Guernica de Picasso and several works by Francis Bacon do too.

Not to mention the numerous literary and thought works that melancholy has generated. Hamlet, the prince of Denmark, is a model of the melancholic depressive. In 1819 Keats composes his famous Ode to Melancholy . Kafka's works also perfectly reflect the anguish of living. As Scott Fitzgerald said: "All life is a demolition process."

My creations are the result of the knowledge of music and pain

But it is the existentialism of the twentieth century that enshrines boredom and boredom as the main attributes of the human condition. An anguish that is not due to anything in particular but to the impossibility precisely to determine the object of that anguish. The nausea (1938) by Jean-Paul Sastre, is one of the great symbols of contemporary anguish. The tedium , by Alberto Moravia, is another.

Also many masterpieces of music have been born at the stroke of pain. "My creations are the result of the knowledge of music and pain," said Franz Schubert. His work, like Beethoven's or Wagner's, is deeply imbued with anguish.

It was Freud who profoundly marked the evolution of the melancholy / depression concept, finding that anguish is part of normal psychism and is doomed to develop. Contemporary anguish gave rise to a new science: psychoanalysis, which put the problem of depression on the table. "From Freud, Western science enters a new phase in which the brain and its dysfunctions acquire a fundamental role," says Roca-Ferrer.

The twentieth century contemplates the democratization of anguish . With the elevation of the standard of living, more and more people are questioning life itself, its meaning. And that affliction, which for centuries was exclusive of the elites, is thus spread to the whole society.

How to deal with melancholy? From the Greco-Roman world there are two the most radical remedies to fight against it: suicide or laughter. Coping with humor is what Rabelais, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Molière, Hume or Voltaire did for example, who advised «rire de tout» . Laugh at everything.

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