ABSTRACT
Although much has been written lately about "workplace depression," it is not a disease of de industrialization or downsizing. On the contrary, social history tells us that leaders and laborers, intellectuals and idiots, and the prosperous and poor alike have suffered from depression since the beginning of time. In Ancient Greece, melancholia was believed to be the result of "imbalanced humors" in the body, specifically an excess of black bile. In the Middle Ages, depressives were imprisoned and tortured. And, as late as the nineteenth century, leeches were applied to the bodies of depressives to suck out the evil and free their sad spirits.
