What is the difference between melancholy and melancholia

While everyone feels down or sad sometimes, normally these moods pass, with little if any long-term consequences. The boundary between this everyday kind of feeling down and clinical depression is imprecise. It ignores the differing — biological, psychological and social — causes that may bring about a particular depressive condition and which inform the most appropriate therapeutic approach be it an antidepressant drug, psychotherapy or social intervention.

As a specifier, and not a disorder in its own right, melancholia is not considered categorically separate to other types of depression. And this matters — much less research and training is devoted to it as a result, and doctors are often unaware of its clinical implications. Melancholic as an adjective : Filled with or affected by melancholy—great sadness or depression, especially of a thoughtful or introspective nature.

Melancholy as an adjective literary : Affected with great sadness or depression. In psychiatry, the word is used to signify an abnormal mood, analogous to the sadness, unhappiness, and misery of everyday experiences. Moreover, the depression discussed in psychiatry often has another quality that makes it distinctive, and this quality appears to be related to an inability to experience any pleasure anhedonia regardless of experience.

Accordingly, we classify these three uses of the term "depression" into sadness, depression, and melancholia in order of appearance within this paper. According to DSM-IV-TR criteria for major depressive disorder, depression corresponds closely to A1 "depressed mood", while melancholia is roughly compatible with A2 "markedly diminished interest or pleasure.

Before DSM-III, depression had not been considered as a diagnosis, but was a ubiquitous symptom that was seen in such conditions as neurasthenia, psychasthenia, nervousness, and neurosis.

Melancholia has a history that reaches back to Hippocratic times. Members Current visitors. Interface Language. Log in. Install the app. Forums English Only English Only. JavaScript is disabled. For a better experience, please enable JavaScript in your browser before proceeding.