Depression - It's the new Melancholy

An idea came into my head while reading the awfully strange 2blowhards website and then I got all Googlasoured (half Googled, half soured, and half dinosaur making, in all, half a wit) trying to track it down.

What happened? I googled melancholy to see what it really is and I came across a piece of academic half-wittedness which makes clinical schizophrenia seem like the only logical way to deal with life:

The history of melancholy is the history of a double significance: at once
individual and societal, subjective and historical. Melancholy is first of
all a specific and individual experience of a particular kind of psychic
suffering, rendered at different moments in its history into the languages
of humoural theory, psychiatry, psychoanalysis and aesthetics. It is also a
concept under the sign of which poets, philosophers and historians have
sought to understand their own historical epochs.

First off, the math confuses me -- it really seems like they have two double significances (whatever that is) in the first sentence.

Second, anyone who feels compelled to note that individual experiences take place at different moment in history? They're being paid by the word, even if that payoff is nothing more pathetic than a Master's Degree.

Finally, it makes me very melancholy to realize that the author is probably allowed, by some state that should know better, to operate a motor-vehicle.

Which is the long way ino the question of depression and its role in day-to-day life (other than subsidizing legalized drug dealers like Pfizer and Glaxo Smith-Kline -- who you can tell are not a US firm by the hyphenated name). It seems like the Buzzcocks lied and everyone is not happy nowadays.

But now people are now happy to be depressed (or happy to pretend to be depressed)... it has become a badge of courage, a proof of creativity that does not require actual creation of anything, and, for lack of a better phrase, a comfortable winge.

Christ, look at the MySpace page of every adolescent in the world and you'll see it was never a more depressing time to be young and healthy and the only response is rebellion 101. In the "old days" however, if you were dumb enough to tattoo every square inch of your body with sub-jailhouse-tat quality ink and then pierce any part of your body that did not contain a vital organ? Well, you'd quite sensibly have been burnt as a witch. Gave the folks something to do on Sundays (pre-football) and kept the gene-pool quite a bit cleaner.

Jesus, I never thought I'd long for old-days I didn't even live through!

But when did depression become desirable, and when did it become a justification for acting out (from black eye-liner to multiple homocides at the old High School?)

And where is my dinner?

I dunno... I guess I got derailed by the internet...

And that's kind of depressing, really...

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