How and why did depression become an epidemic disease? Based on a conceptual history of melancholy and depression, Konstantin Ingenkamp develops his own perspective, which is well-founded in cultural science. It is directed against the increasing pathologizing as well as against the wide-spread thesis that mental illnesses are constantly increasing.Instead, depression is viewed as a state of mind that is part of the human condition and that can be found as the opposite of »positive thinking« in protestant awakening movements of the 19<sup>th</sup> century, and also as a counter term of »mental health« during the cold war. Only with the boom of psychotropic drugs in the contemporary »health society« does depression become an epidemic disease, as the author shows.
