Mantuans have just been caught by a thunderstorm when, in a classroom at Politecnico di Milano's Mantova Campus, Gioele P. Cima, psychologist, independent researcher, and author of L'epoca della vulnerabilità (The Age of Vulnerability) meets two dozen people in a very intimate event which in part looks like a seminar and in part like an open discussion. Outside, people hurry under colourful umbrellas in a rained-upon Piazza d’Arco, but inside the quiet room, the big tables that usually host architecture students give their welcome to a small and yet very interested crowd that might not be able to build the prototype of a building, but will surely participate in this discussion with open ears and mind.

It’s indeed in such spirit that the conversation moves forward: Cima starts asking his crowd to share the reason they came there and what differentiates tristezza (sadness) from depressione (depression) in their opinion. Why is it so difficult to explain your sadness to someone else while everything becomes easy when you say that you are depressed? Is it only a problem psychology can address? Is sadness/depression universal across cultures?

As Cima explained in his book, we live in a specific moment in time when psychology and its jargon have been widely accepted in our lives and vocabulary. We are not worried about our future, we are anxious about it; if a woman is acting crazy, people say that she’s hysterical. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are often used as helpful medical tools to help people overcome depressive states, and psychology seems to be able to describe our mind and give us solutions much better than our own feelings can.

However, there was a time when depressed states of mind were not a matter for the study of the mind; and indeed the term melanconia (melancholy in English), literally “black bile”, was used to describe a peculiar type of unease that was not only mental, but physical, in other words, a disease. The French expression ça va? (“is it going”) was originally a question that doctors asked their patients about the state of their gut system.

The perception of sadness and depression seem to vary across cultures, and some perceive depression and sadness in a completely different way. Some tribes, for example, don’t even have any idea of what “mourning” means. On the other hand, as Cima put it, depression is a “Western-world creature” that was somehow “exported” abroad: until XIX-century psychologists decided to export the term depression, for example, the Japanese language didn’t have a word to describe it – it did not exist as a concept. This is why the Japanese expression kokoro no kaze literally means “cold of the soul”, something that sounds more like sadness to than what we might consider depression.