[From melancolia to major depression: a critical excursus.]

The history of the transition from Kraepelin's concept of manic-depressive psychosis and endogenous depression to the current model of major depression is traced. In particular, the changes that have characterized the transition from the narrative psychopathology of the positivist era to the operational psychiatry of the DSM-III and its successors over the last century are critically reviewed. The birth of psychopharmacology, with the consequent entry of market interests into psychiatry and de-institutionalization, have shifted psychiatric patients from mental hospitals to outpatient clinics, resulting in enormous changes in both quantity and quality of samples. The changing composition of psychiatric population, with an ever-increasing prevalence of non-psychotic cases, and the progressive abandonment of the phenomenological cultural substratum in favor of more empirical paradigms, has rendered old classifications based on narrative criteria inadequate. Hence the need for more 'scientific' models, driven mainly by the need for reproducibility, was necessary for the application of scientific empirical methods. This article focuses on the changes that the concept of depressive illness has undergone in the transition from descriptive psychopathology to the current operational diagnoses. The various forms of depression described prior to DSM-III (endogenous depression, neurotic depression, reactive depression, atypical depression, seasonal depression, masked depression, involutional depression, depressive pseudodementia), examined in the frame do DSM-5, are either excluded because of the lack of evident depression (masked depression, depressive pseudodementia) or all absorbed into the single broad category of major depressive disorder, which thus becomes a broad container which is likely to lack homogeneity, as has been repeatedly pointed out over the years. On the other hand, what the authors of DSM (the latest edition in particular) have proposed as a remedy, the sub-categorization of the disorder through the description of specific typer (the specifiers), is in fact ignored both in research and in clinical practice.