Adam Smith on Depression
To read some contemporary commentators (Sally Satel reviews one here), you'd think nobody ever considered depression a disease before evil pharmaceutical companies invented Prozac. To the contrary, here's Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments on the subject:
Nature, in her sound and healthful state, seems never to prompt us to suicide. There is, indeed, a species of melancholy (a disease to which human nature, among its other calamities, is unhappily subject) which seems to be accompanied with, what one may call, an irresistible appetite for self-destruction. In circumstances often of the highest external prosperity, and sometimes too, in spite even of the most serious and deeply impressed sentiments of religion, this disease has frequently been known to drive its wretched victims to this fatal extremity. The unfortunate persons who perish in this miserable manner, are the proper objects, not of censure, but of commiseration. To attempt to punish them, when they are beyond the reach of all human punishment, is not more absurd than it is unjust.
I'm reading most of Smith's collected works in preparation for a week-long Liberty Fund seminar, affectionately known as Adam Smith Camp. For searchable, nicely formatted, full-text versions of works by Smith and other classic writers, see Liberty Fund's terrific Library of Economics and Liberty. The Econlib site also features Arnold Kling and Bryan Caplan's blog and other contemporary writings.