involutional melancholia

Involutional melancholia is classically treated with antidepressants and mood elevators.

It stood as a grudging tribute to the months he had held out against involutional melancholia in the yute Blank Tanks.

Involutional melancholia or involutional depression is a traditional name for a psychiatric disorder affecting mainly elderly or late middle-aged people, usually accompanied with paranoia.

Some of the categories he described included obsessive-compulsive disorders, delusional disorders, degenerative diseases, involutional melancholia, and states of abnormal excitement.

Emil Kraepelin (1907) was the first to describe involutional melancholia as a distinct clinical entity separate from the manic-depressive psychosis, arguing that 'the processes of involution in the body are suited to engender mournful or anxious moodiness'.

Right up until 'the seventh edition of his textbook Kraepelin considered involutional melancholia as a separate disease', of acquired origin, but (partly in response to Dreyfus) 'he decided to include it in the eighth edition under the general heading of manic depressive insanity'.

Dreyfus (1907) had challenged Kraepelin's concept of an acquired origin, maintaining it to be endogenous in origin - although 'a recent statistical study of Dreyfus's old series has also shown that his conclusion that the natural history of involutional melancholia was no different from that of depression affecting younger subjects was wrong'.