Mental depression is a serious issue in contemporary New Zealand, and it has an increasingly high profile. But during our history, depression has often been hidden under a long black cloud of denial that we have not always lived up to the Kiwi ideal of being pragmatic and have not always coped.
Using historic patient records as a starting place, and informed by her own experience of depression, academic Jacqueline Leckie’s timely social history of depression in Aotearoa analyses its medical, cultural and social contexts
through an historical lens. From detailing its links to melancholia and explaining its expression within Indigenous and migrant communities, this engrossing book interrogates how depression was medicalised and has been treated, and how New Zealanders have lived with it.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 312
Imprint: Massey University Press
Publication date: 13/06/2024
Don’t just take our word for it, here’s what others are saying:
‘Highly accessible, uniquely insightful’ — Allan McEvoy, Kete
‘Authoritative, erudite, and highly readable’ — Solomon Lewis, North & South
‘A story that needed to be told’ — Sapeer Mayron, Sunday Star-Times
‘The sort of book that enriches this country’ — Nicholas Reid, Reid’s Reader
‘The beautiful and the damned’: An extract from Old Black Cloud on Newsroom
Dale Husband interviews Jacqueline Leckie on Waatea News’s Paakiwaha here
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