Old Black Cloud

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, cul