This project will examine depression in the United States between 1900 and 2000, particularly the social, cultural, political, economic, and professional forces that affected medical and popular ideas about this disease. For centuries, physicians have described an entity that today would be identified as melancholia or depression, but psychiatric diagnosis and treatment of depression have changed dramatically over the most recent century. Not only have medical ideas about depression changed in the last century, but also there have emerged popular ideas about depression that sometimes complement but also complicate professional ideas. The popular narratives about depression have grown in importance against a backdrop of expanding media sources, both visual and print. The proposed project will examine both medical and popular ideas about depression in the twentieth century. By using medical literature, this project will trace changes in the category of depression from involutional melancholia to the creation of specific diagnostic criteria with the third and subsequent editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). By rigorously analyzing magazine articles on mental illness and depression, it will be possible to understand cultural sources of information on this disease. Specific themes to be addressed throughout this study will be, 1) the role of gender in constructing categories; 2) the relationship between popular and psychiatric representations of depression and the role of culture in disease definitions; and 3) the shifting nature of psychiatric authority and professionalization. The product of this project will be a book length monograph, of interest to both historians and psychiatrists, to be published by a university press.
