Melancholy is a vague sadness that usually persists.
Melancholy is a term that derives from Latin and, in turn, has its origin in a Greek word that means "black bile." It is vague, permanent and deep sadness , which may have arisen from a physical or moral cause and which makes the person who suffers from it not feel comfortable or enjoy life.
Melancholy is often treated today as an illness that can be alleviated through a combination of therapy and certain drugs . The basis of the treatments is psychological analysis, to reach the internal causes of melancholy, while drugs aim to control the physical symptoms that the disorder can generate (such as stomach upset, headache and others).
About melancholy
Specialists consider that melancholy, like sadness and other emotions, becomes pathological when it alters the individual's normal thinking and hinders their social performance.
For example: it is considered normal for a person to feel melancholic one afternoon and stay at home looking at old photographs; On the other hand, if this behavior is repeated over several days and the subject abandons his social life and obligations, melancholy becomes a type of depression , and requires treatment.
Melancholy can turn into depression and require professional treatment.
The concept in music
In the '90s, the grunge movement created a kind of cult of melancholy and disenchantment. In fact, the North American band Smashing Pumpinks released an album titled "Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness" (a play on words that can well be understood as "melancholy and infinite sadness" ).
Many musical genres rely on melancholy, as happens with a significant portion of the operatic repertoire (especially of Italian origin) and pop music, no matter how diverse they may seem at first glance. It is not difficult to understand the reasons, since art is in direct contact with our emotions and many people rely on music to overcome difficult moments in life, such as the loss of a loved one. In this sense, however, a song with a melancholic tone cannot be very beneficial for anyone, since the incessant lament in the face of an irreparable event is the potential beginning of depression.
Freud, mourning and melancholy
The celebrated and controversial father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, published a writing in 1915 entitled "Mourning and Melancholy" , through which he developed a comparison of grief that was considered normal and melancholy taken as pathology; To do this, it analyzes certain common points, such as the feeling of pain , the loss of will to connect with the outside world, the detachment of one's own feelings and the decrease in productivity.
It should be noted that both states are triggered after having lost a loved object or after the collapse of an ideal. Let's see below some distinctive points of each case:
* Grief is defined as the reaction to loss (which may or may not be of a person) and it is a conscious situation, which is characterized by constant reflection about the absence of said loved object;
* melancholy occurs due to the lack of acceptance of the loss , due to resignation in the face of the lack of the loved object;
* Grief consists of overcoming the loss in a variable period of time, after which the discomfort is eliminated and there is the possibility of moving forward;
* Melancholy distorts the situation and turns the absence of a loved one into a personal issue, which threatens, among other things, one's own self-esteem .