ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how cultural and medical perceptions of normal sadness have been transformed with the ascent of clinical depression. Prior to the modern period, sadness was a diverse cultural phenomenon existing in a complex relationship with melancholy, melancholia and other emotional and physical states. Since the early nineteenth century, various expressions of sadness, grief, melancholy and despair have increasingly been merged under the label ‘depression’. At the same time, the boundary between normal and pathological low mood has grown increasingly fuzzy. This chapter maps shifting perceptions of sadness and low mood in the west across time and asks what it means to be sad in the age of depression.
