Around the time Descartes made known his famous edict 'I think, therefore I am', ... historians talk(ed) of 'an epidemic' of depression in Europe.
Oliver Cromwell, John Bunyan and John Donne were among its (famous) victims.
Cohen then quotes Death Be Not Proud by John Donne.
Depressed? Now all you need to do is find the cure, he cheerfully exhorts.
...
Cohen's erudite commentary runs all of two pages and compounds the issue, perhaps on purpose. He seems to concentrate on figures of the past, leaving out such famous depressives as Winston Churchill and Buzz Aldrin, the second man to set foot on the moon.
The UN's WHO (World Health Organization) has reason to predict that depression would be the third largest cause of death by 2020, following heart disease and cancer, since depressed people tend to feel suicidal. (Elsewhere I learned that viral diseases cause the greatest number of deaths worldwide)
I have been depressed on three separate occasions with varying degrees of severity and recovered from them in different ways. The last time I felt sufficiently unhappy to seek help was in 2003 after which I joined the local Catholic church.
Apparently the sense of isolation that Cohen refers to was a probable cause of my illness, for I have not had a return of the 'melancholy' since.
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