Depression in the olden days

Post on 02-Nov-2014

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http://positivetranceformations.com.au/blog/nothing-new-under-the-sun/ In Hippocrates’ time, the blame for a tendency towards depression was put on an imbalance of the four “bodily humours” (blood, black bile, bile and phlegm) where black bile (the Greek for this gives us the word “melancholy”) was found in excess. Today, we know that they weren’t far wrong.

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Depression in the Olden Dayspositivetranceformations.com.au

We tend to think of all the things for which people come to get help from

hypnotherapy as being modern diseases or conditions.

Surely, people reason, we didn’t all live such stressful lives in the past and people didn’t suffer so

much from conditions like depression or panic attacks and anxiety disorders, and we didn’t

turn to hypnotherapy for help with quitting smoking or losing weight.

Well, the answer to this is both yes and no. Certainly, the pace of modern life means that the demands put on us

are more urgent and we have more deadlines to face these days, which

wasn’t the case in the past.

If you were, say, a farmer, you might have had to work extremely hard, but if your plough horse lost a shoe and

meant that you couldn’t finish ploughing that field

half a day while you went to the blacksmith wasn’t too much of a

problem in the long run and you could still get your crops sown in time.

Some of the stresses of the past might have also meant that people enjoyed the present moment a lot more (a great way of heading off

problems with anxiety and depression).

If the Black Plague was sweeping the country or if you had been invaded by

a foreign army, it was stressful, all right,

but this could have the effect of making you enjoy pleasant pleasures here and now while you can, as the good times might not have lasted

long.

But people in the past did have problems with depression and anxiety

disorder and panic attacks.

However, they tended to call them by different names.

The combination of anxiety disorder and panic attacks tended to be

lumped together as hysteria, and it was hysteria that good old Dr

Sigmund Freud was trying to find a cure for when he discovered the

clinical uses of hypnosis.

Depression, on the other hand, was often referred to as “melancholy”.

In the very early days of medicine, in the time of Classical Greece when

Hippocrates was practising and establishing the principles of

professional medicine that are still active today,

people noticed that certain personality types had a greater tendency towards

depression.

Scientists and psychologists today would agree.

In Hippocrates’ time, the blame for a tendency towards depression was put

on an imbalance of the four “bodily humours” (blood, black bile, bile and phlegm) where black bile (the Greek

for this gives us the word “melancholy”) was found in excess.

Today, we know that they weren’t far wrong, as often, it’s an imbalance of brain chemicals and hormones that

creates a tendency towards depression.