The Two Weeks That Make a Diagnosis

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Modern psychiatry defines depression with a precision the ancient humoral theory never attempted: a depressed mood or loss of interest and pleasure in daily activities that persists most of the day, nearly every day, for at least two weeks, arising from a genuinely complex mix of social, psychological and biological factors rather than a single cause anyone can point to. The World Health Organization estimates that 5.7 percent of adults worldwide live with depression, a figure that splits unevenly by sex, 4.6 percent of men against 6.9 percent of women, and rises further among specific groups: 5.9 percent of adults aged seventy and older, and more than 10 percent of pregnant women and women who have just given birth.

The condition's most severe consequence is measured separately but is closely tied to it: suicide killed an estimated 727,000 people in 2021 and remains the third leading cause of death among people aged fifteen to twenty-nine worldwide. Even in wealthy countries, treatment does not reliably follow diagnosis; the World Health Organization reports that in high-income countries only about a third of people with depression receive any mental health treatment at all, a gap this atlas records as part of the condition's history rather than a footnote to it.