Age of Melancholy: Major Depression and Its Social Origins

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G. K. Chesterton once wrote, "The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present."¹ Having recently moved beyond the decade of the brain, psychiatry, flush with the vast, rapidly expanding amount of exciting and previously unimagined data about the genetics, functional neuroanatomy, neurochemistry, and neurobiology of psychiatric illness, has ignored and sometimes rashly discarded the knowledge, wisdom, and perspectives of previous generations of psychiatrists.

In this brief volume, packed with information, Dr. Blazer, a geriatric psychiatrist and sociological epidemiologist, surveys the field of depression from the perspectives of epidemiology, sociology, and psychiatry.