Britain: squalid, ugly, uncivil. (Peter Dazeley/Getty)

Anyone with experience of depression will recognise the approaching symptoms: a numbed blankness of feeling, or pangs of melancholy nostalgia for a lost contentment now impossible to imagine. A black cloud of affectless lethargy drains life of purpose, making any exertion of effort impossible. This torpor, this sense of inability to arrest fate dominates pre-20th-century descriptions of melancholy, the pre-medicalised ancestor of our modern depression.
As the writer Philip Pullman puts it in his 2005 introduction to The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton’s sonorous and digressive 17th century masterwork, “those readers who have some experience of the disorder of the mind we now call depression will know that the opposite of that dire state is not happiness but energy”.
By this definition, we could say the British state is, if not depressed, consumed by melancholy. Doom is sensed lying on the horizon but the exertion of will necessary to avert it is no longer seen as possible, or even desirable. The British state lies in bed staring at the ceiling, waiting for death. It cannot build houses, it cannot build railways; it cannot dig a hole in the ground and fill it with water; it cannot fix schools that are falling down. The simplest task is too difficult, and anyway, why even bother? There are always reasons to be found for why any exertion is pointless, why helplessness is sensible policy. No wonder, like children of a depressed parent, young Britons now yearn to flee the oppressive atmosphere of home. Yet Burton’s text, reissued for its 400th anniversary, reminds us that we have been here before.
Anatomy is most often read today as a pre-modern self-help book. Yet it contains within it, rarely-discussed, an astute reading of the nation’s political dysfunction that uncannily echoes the present. “Kingdoms, provinces and Politickal Bodies are subject in like manner to this disease,” says Burton, with the body politic exhibiting the same symptoms of what later writers would term “the English malady”. For where “you shall see many discontents, common grievances, complaints, poverty… cities decayed, base and poor towns… the people squalid, ugly, uncivil; that kingdom, that country, must needs be discontent, melancholy, hath a sick body, and had need to be reformed.”
Burton’s diagnosis is distressingly apt for modern Britain. According to ONS statistics, around one in six British adults suffered moderate to severe symptoms of depression last autumn, while 17% of British adults are taking antidepressants; but among those aged between 16 and 29, depression rates reach 28%, and for those under 24, up to 46%. Depression and anxiety are now the greatest drivers of long-term unemployment, and suicide is the single most common cause of death in young British men. Whatever the psychic wounds of postmodernity or social media, the most obvious cause is material: the insecurity built into Britain’s faltering economic model. Renters suffer depression at twice the rate of homeowners, while dwindling savings and growing debt strongly correspond with increased rates of mental distress, and homelessness is on the rise. The body politic and personal health are intertwined: Britain’s economic dysfunction is making people depressed, and deteriorating mental health is weighing down productivity. But how to reform such an unhappy polity?
As the historian William Mueller noted in his forgotten 1952 book on Burton as a political theorist, “A distressed state and a diseased individual, macrocosm and microcosm, can look to similar cures.” Burton regarded the economic instability of England as one of the principal causes of the melancholy of his day, so “the emphasis on economic reform runs throughout Burton’s Utopia, underlining his contention that one effective antidote to England’s melancholy lay in economic advance”.
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