Author(s): Jacqueline Leckie

NZ History | Psychology & the brain

Mental depression is a serious issue in contemporary New Zealand, and it has anincreasingly high profile. But during our history, depression has often been hiddenunder a long black cloud of denial that we have not always lived up to the Kiwiideal of being pragmatic and have not always coped.Using historic patient records as a starting place, and informed by her ownexperience of depression, academic Jacqueline Leckie's timely social historyof depression in Aotearoa analyses its medical, cultural and social contextsthrough an historical lens. From detailing its links to melancholia and explainingits expression within Indigenous and migrant communities, this engrossing bookinterrogates how depression was medicalised and has been treated, and howNew Zealanders have lived with it.