Article ID: CBB000932566

Gender, Age, and Diagnosis: The Rise and Fall of Involutional Melancholia in American Psychiatry, 1900--1980 (2009)

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Between 1900 and 1980, American psychiatrists employed a diagnosis of involutional melancholia to characterize older individuals, primarily postmenopausal women, who had constellations of depressive symptoms and specific personality traits. American interest in this diagnosis represented a confluence of social and psychoanalytic assumptions about gender, increased interest in old age, and the development of somatic therapies by the middle of the century. In the decades after the introduction of psychiatric medications, however, involutional melancholia lost its significance as a specific disease and was absorbed into the broader category of major depressive disorder.

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Authors & Contributors
Hirshbein, Laura Davidow
Shorter, Edward
Zorzanelli, Rafaela Teixeira
Staub, Michael E.
Starks, Sarah Linsley
Smith, Matthew
Journals
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences
Medical History
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences
History of Psychology
Social History of Medicine
Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences
Publishers
Oxford University Press
W. W. Norton & Co.
University of Chicago Press
Rutgers University Press
Princeton University Press
Johns Hopkins University Press
Concepts
Psychiatry
Diagnosis
Mental disorders and diseases
Depression
Clinical psychology
Psychoanalysis
People
Spitzer, Robert L.
Kraepelin, Emil
Kinsey, Alfred C.
Freud, Sigmund
Beck, Aaron T.
Beard, George Miller
Time Periods
20th century
20th century, late
21st century
19th century
Early modern
Medieval
Places
United States
Europe
China
Brazil
Institutions
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)
United States. Food and Drug Administration (USFDA)
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