How we learned to stop having fun

| 3. April 2007 | | Jure

Zanimiv članek o epidemiji depresije, opaženi v Angliji 17. stoletja. Vzpon individuuma ima svojo ceno - depresije in anksioznost modernega Evropejca. Za nameček smo zavrgli še zdravilo.

Urbanisation and the rise of a competitive, market-based economy favoured a more anxious and isolated sort of person - potentially both prone to depression and distrustful of communal pleasures. Calvinism provided a transcendent rationale for this shift, intensifying the isolation and practically institutionalising depression as a stage in the quest for salvation. At the level of “deep, underlying psychological change”, both depression and the destruction of festivities could be described as seemingly inevitable consequences of the broad process known as modernisation. But could there also be a more straightforward link, a way in which the death of carnival contributed directly to the epidemic of depression?