The British Journal of Psychiatry have a regular series called "In 100 Words", which produces some gems. This month they have Melanchola in 100 Words, featuring perhaps the most influential musician you haven't heard of, Robert Johnson.
I got stones in my pathway/And my road seems dark at night/I have pains in my heart/They have taken my appetite.I've previously written about the blues and what shade of blue they were talking about, here. But this actually isn't the first Melancholia in 100 Words to appear in the BJP. Here's another one from 2009
Robert Johnson, known as the King of the Delta blues singers, distilled into these lines the essence of severe depressive illness – somatic ills, fear and suspicion, emotional and physical pain, nocturnal troubles and struggle against obstacles. The words are one with the powerful, haunting music. ICD-10 and DSM-IV have their place, but poets have often been there before us, and done a better job. We can all learn from Robert Johnson, born just 100 years ago.
Melancholia is a classical episodic depressive disorder that combines mood, psychomotor, cognitive and vegetative components with high suicide risk. In the present psychiatric classification it is buried as a modifier in both bipolar and unipolar depressions. It is hardly used to characterise patients in the clinic or research.
The syndrome is frequently recognised in delusional and agitated depression, and in the elderly. Cortisol or sleep EEG abnormalities are prognostically helpful. Melancholia is particularly responsive to tricyclic antidepressants and electroconvulsive therapy but not to selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors or psychotherapy. Recognising melancholia as a distinct disorder improves clinical care and research.
4 comments:
If you sell your soul to the Devil does he take the depression too?
I have long thought that the assumed association of Blues music with clinical melancholia was overwrought. The music speaks, I think, more to the struggle against social barriers and to the despondency/demoralization that occurs in the face of frustrative nonreward. The key difference is that frustrative nonreward is externally driven rather than arising from within.
As I read through the entirety of Robert Johnson’s song Stones in My Passway today I saw not despair so much as yearning for acceptance.
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~music/blues/simp.html
Do people who sing lots of songs about love actually spend more time in love than the norm? Maybe the (undeniable) theme of sadness in blues music is simply a lyrical convention. Perhaps we could do some science -- for example, did BB King sing about more cheerful subjects after he rose to fame? (I suspect not.)
melancholia is the recognition that it is other people, and not you, who cannot follow along worth a damn. they are short in attention outside of themselves, while those of us who see the entire situation are classified as AD/HD, we are more AC/DC than the rest, and they cannot keep up long enough to understand one sentence, let alone an entire paragraph.
Witness David Foster Wallace as a well known persona, for example. I feel it causes a lot of self-medication, then we are classified as tending toward abuse/dependency/nut hut denizens. that's what creates the secondary melancholy, diagnosed as depression and treated with antidepressants, which negate personality in people who were never depressed to begin with.
bank it.
reneabarry@msn.com
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