apy. Depression is extremely widespread in our society without yet being widely understood. An examination of depression in older women must therefore begin with an attempt to define both depression itself and the issues associated with its treatment and study.
Depression in Historical Context
Depression has been part of human society since at least since the earliest historical times. References to depression appear in the Old Testament, and physicians in Ancient Greece recognized "melancholy" as a disorder. During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, depression was among the common ills that became the target of increasingly sophisticated efforts at explanation and treatment. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Freud incorporated an explanation of depression into his psychodynamic theory, and Kraepelin worked on means of classifying depression for diagnosis and treatment. The definition of depression became, moreover, the center of a generation long controversy within psychiatry. As a widespread psychologic
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