Gender, Age, and Diagnosis: The Rise and Fall of Involutional Melancholia in American Psychiatry, 1900–1980

Between 1900 and 1980, American psychiatrists employed a diagnosis of involutional melancholia to characterize older individuals, primarily postmenopausal women, who had constellations of depressive symptoms and specific personality traits. American interest in this diagnosis represented a confluence of social and psychoanalytic assumptions about gender, increased interest in old age, and the development of somatic therapies by the middle of the century. In the decades after the introduction of psychiatric medications, however, involutional melancholia lost its significance as a specific disease and was absorbed into the broader category of major depressive disorder.