How did people deal/understand with depression before it was even called depression?
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I could give you complicated answers; however, it all boils down to misery, death and drugs. Opium was popular for many years to take the edge off depression.
From the Greeks. It was called melancholia, ‘black bile’, one of the four humors/temperaments.
Laudanum was a popular drug during the Victorian era (opium dissolved in alcohol) for writers/creative types.
The struggle to survive generally took precedence over the struggle to feel good or even ok. People ran their lives on culture and principles and not on how they felt. The people who were so depressed as to be dysfunctional were sent to asylums without any correct diagnosis. I’ve known some old timers with issues and they generally just treated everyone like garbage because they never had any treatment. Or else they were reclusive alcoholics.
They’d call the person ‘melancholic’ or ‘sickly’ or ‘reclusive’ – and in a lot of cases I think the person dealt with the problem through alcohol, opiates or suicide. And they probably got shamed/threatened/beaten into doing some kind of work, no matter how lousy they were feeling.
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