Zur Verwendungs- und Bedeutungsentwicklung der Ausdrücke Melancholie und Depression in der psychiatrischen Fachkommunikation des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts

Derived from its own, historically grown self-image of a scientific discipline, psychiatry has seen and still sees itself confronted with the problem of taking up, reinterpreting and further developing the meaning of culturally predetermined disease and disorder patterns. Ever since its initial recourse to culturally influenced, mostly polysemous concepts and terms, the psychiatric terminology repertoire has been subject to numerous and extensive processes of change. The terms melancholia and depression are both exemplary for discourses on specific disorder terms. The aim of this article is therefore to analyze the development of these two terms and to examine the diachronic relationship between melancholia and depression with reference to psychiatric-historical research literature. Based on a comprehensive corpus of psychiatric communication, consisting of texts from the end of the 18th century to the beginning of the 21st century, a contribution will be made to outline the history of psychiatry from its romantic beginnings to its emerging empirical-scientific linguistic style by analyzing the processes of term usages.