Barbara Ehrenreich looks at the “epidemic” of depression, which began in the seventeeth century and has continued, unabated, to the present day.

We do not have to rely on psychological inference to draw a link between Calvinism and depression. There is one clear marker for depression—suicide—and suicide rates have been recorded, with varying degrees of diligence, for centuries. In his classic study, [Émile] Durkheim found that Protestants in the nineteenth century—not all of whom, of course, were of the Calvinistic persuasion—were about twice as likely to take their own lives as Catholics. More strikingly, a recent analysis finds a sudden surge of suicide in the Swiss canton of Zurich, beginning in the late sixteenth century, just as that region became a Calvinist stronghold. Some sort of general breakdown of social mores cannot be invoked as an explanation, since homicides fell as suicides rose.

So if we are looking for a common source of depression on the one hand, and the suppression of festivities on the other, it is not hard to find. Urbanization and the rise of a competitive, market-based economy favored a more anxious and isolated sort of person—potentially both prone to depression and distrustful of communal pleasures. Calvinism provided a transcendent rationale for this shift, intensifying the isolation and practically institutionalizing depression as a stage in the quest for salvation. At the level of “deep, underlying psychological change,” both depression and the destruction of festivities could be described as seemingly inevitable consequences of the broad process known as modernization. But could there also be a more straightforward link, a way in which the death of carnival contributed directly to the epidemic of depression?

It may be that in abandoning their traditional festivities, people lost a potentially effective cure for it. [Robert] Burton suggested many cures for melancholy—study and exercise, for example—but he returned again and again to the same prescription: “Let them use hunting, sports, plays, jests, merry company … a cup of good drink now and then, hear musick, and have such companions with whom they are especially delighted; merry tales or toys, drinking, singing, dancing, and whatsoever else may procure mirth.” He acknowledged the ongoing attack on “Dancing, Singing, Masking, Mumming, Stage-plays” by “some severe Gatos,” referring to the Calvinists, but heartily endorsed the traditional forms of festivity: “Let them freely feast, sing and dance, have their Puppet-plays, Hobby-horses, Tabers, Crowds, Bagpipes, &c, play at Ball, and Barley-breaks, and what sports and recreations they like best.” In his ideal world, “none shall be over-tired, but have their set times of recreations and holidays, to indulge their humour, feasts and merry meetings …” His views accorded with treatments of melancholy already in use in the sixteenth century. While the disruptively “mad” were confined and cruelly treated, melancholics were, at least in theory, to be “refreshed & comforted” and “gladded with instruments of musick.”