Melancholia was described during the fifth and fourth centuries BC by Hippocrates, a Greek physician, as being plagued with ongoing 'uncertainties and anxieties'.

At the late 20th century, and at present, this illness is now absent in the manual.

Gordon Parker, psychiatry professor at the University of NSW and director of Black Dog Institute in Sydney, is leading a team of psychiatrists from all over the globe who wants this ancient illness its own right at the 2013 edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Prof. Parker, however, said that prescribing drugs that is effective for patients with depression may be dangerous to those who were suffering from melancholia. The illness that has affected patients since birth and is not brought about by environmental conditions usually only responds to certain types of antidepressants or therapy.

Melancholia needs a separate diagnosis that requires a different type of treatment compared to those other depressive conditions that had been diagnosed. he said.

The Black Dog Institute is now ready to embark on a study of three cures for melancholia that will approximately take three years and is now calling for volunteers to take an active part in this trial.

We need a more rational model that will actually do to the sales of antidepressants available in the market, but not an expansion if it. Parker said.

However, this move created criticisms from the opposition.

It's an old scheme that at the end of the day, there isn't any biological markers that will show us different kinds of depression and the capacity to provide us with different treatments. said Ian Hickie, executive director of the Brain and Mind Institute.

Medicine