'Mood Disorder and Public Health: Seventeenth and Twenty-first Century Models'

Jennifer Radden (University of Massachusetts, Boston)

Title: 'Mood Disorder and Public Health: Seventeenth and Twenty-first Century Models'.

Read selectively, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) bears striking similarities to some recent trends in today’s mind sciences. Its model of mind proves compatible with today’s cognitivist assumptions and with findings of contemporary brain science. And it relies on a conception of disease that, while it pre-dates the etiological models relied on in much of medicine today, corresponds to the network models recently proposed for mental disorders like depression. But Burton’s pre-modern compendium of classical and renaissance psychology also contains treatment principles and recommendations with surprising parallels in today’s approaches to the treatment of mood disorders, especially depression. Its emphasis on early prevention, eclectic and complementary practices, and self help, all anticipate the very recent trend towards public health approaches prompted by the apparently epidemic, worldwide incidence of depression, observed since the 1990s. With talk of “behavioral vaccines;” non-individuating preventive measures, including those directed at the young to avert mood disorders before they arise, and the use of aps providing self-administered cognitive therapy, this trend is part of a broader critique of the limitations of diagnostic psychiatry. The parallels between the earlier ideas and these contemporary developments are examined here to demonstrate the broader historical context for the twenty-first century public mental health care that seems to be fast joining, or even supplanting, earlier diagnostic and clinical approaches.