Clinical and Biochemical Manifestations of Depression

THROUGHOUT most of recorded history, literary and clinical descriptions of depression have adhered to a rigid separation between mental processes and their physical substrates. This impediment to scientific inquiry held sway until Spinoza argued forcefully against the dualism of mind and body and Darwin helped to explain the purposefulness of the living organism in terms of natural selection rather than divine intention.1 In this century, Freud's deromanticizing of the psyche2 and Kraepelin's accurate descriptions of the major psychoses3 set the stage for contemporary efforts to understand mental disorders.We now know that major depression is a heritable, recurrent, syndromal illness. . . .