ABSTRACT
Most books that have been written on the history of psychiatry do not go back further than the last two centuries. Ignorance of history can lead us to the often misguided view that society's current problems are new. It follows that if we have no knowledge of depression occurring in ancient times it is tempting to believe that it is a creation of modern life. We have only recently started to look for accounts of depression in ancient texts, so challenging the idea that depression is a modern malaise is quite new.
