These problems of melancholia are difficult to place and are due to a wide variety of causes. I will list them here, and the list may at some time serve you.

1. A sense of frustration, a thwarted wish-life, or a recognition of a basic life failure.
2. A sense of dramatics, and a desire to figure importantly on the little stage of a person's life. This can often be quite unrealized and have a truly subconscious origin, or it can be a carefully cultivated habit or attitude.
3. A devitalized condition, largely of an etheric nature, which robs life of all joy and desire and presents always a sense of futility. Many women passing through the menopause experience this. [339]
4. A certain form of breakdown in the cells found in a particular area of the brain.
5. Based on fear of insanity and of death - a baseless fear which has never materialized but which does constitute an idée fixe, so that the person is the victim of a well developed thought-form.
6. A tuning-in, through over-sensitivity, on the suffering and massed pain of the world. Disciples can be temporarily overcome by this.
7. This condition is very seldom brought about by any form of obsession such as "an earth bound entity or a living vampire-like person." A very few such cases have been known, but they are too rare to be considered a factor.
8. Sometimes a person tunes in on a state of massed melancholia, such as can be found in our sanitariums or asylums. The condition has then nothing really to do with him, but being sensitive, he identifies himself with those who are suffering from acute melancholia.
9. Melancholia, as a symptom of disease (not of brain disease) is also fairly frequent and will disappear when the disease is under proper treatment.