Word: melancholia
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Tony Kushner's Pulitzre prize-winning play, Angels in America: Millennium Approaches tells the modern story of death as result of AIDS. Kushner shows his character in their turmoils, their laughs and their delusions. Unlike Kushner's well-paced play, which balance the melancholia, depression and heartache surrounding this deadly disease, French film maker Cyril Collard's "Savage Nights" (or "Les Nuits Fauves") approaches the subject of AIDS in a much more dramatic, passionate, insane way, one which, ultimately, is unable to remain comprehensible...
...intention, even the central focus of the Dream of the Red Spider, but the critical flatness and distance that can lift a farce above its banal and stereotypical underpinnings never surface. The author's despair and alienation are evident, but we are never given any reason for his whiny melancholia. It is a shame that the truly complex and harrowing aspects of life under a dictatorship are not examined in depth, for instance as in Ariel Dorfman's recent Death of the Maiden, instead of being subjected to this shallow evaluation and empty philosophizing. Instead of entering his world...
...treatment of ordinary depression -- the crushing despondency that strikes more than 12 million Americans each year and accounts for at least half the nation's suicides -- that represents mental health's greatest success story. The condition once called melancholia, and now better known as clinical or major depression, has been the target of an all-fronts research assault over the past decade. The immediate result is a crop of new, highly specific antidepressant drugs that offer fast relief with relatively few side effects. Today depression can be treated -- quickly and effectively -- in 7 cases out of 10. If a second...
...neuroendocrinology branch of the NIMH, began looking for the hormone in his depressed patients, he found it was not only elevated, but elevated all the time -- even during sleep. What looked like depression was really a state of hyper-arousal, a kind of permanent flight-or-fight response. "In melancholia," explains Gold, "CRH gets stuck...
Relatively little of Freud's voluminous work is devoted to the empirical study of clinical depression. His writings discuss only four patients who were known for certain to have suffered from major depression, and he published only one paper on the subject -- "Mourning and Melancholia" (1917) -- which contrasted ordinary grief and acute depression. He wrote somewhat more extensively about schizophrenia, which he called "paraphrenia." But he was always doubtful that psychoanalysis would be of much help in treating it. The schizophrenic's lack of interest in the external world, Freud wrote, made him inaccessible to transference. That...