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Okay... different approach.

Before we had anti-depressants, how often was depression clinically diagnosed compared with today?

This is an intriguing question and probably one that can't be teased apart, because diagnosis and treatment developments are so inter-connected. Sorry, but this will be my boring and long-winded analysis. The average lifespan 100 years ago was less than 50 years of age (getting back to my longevity theory). The medical knowledge 100 years ago was impressive for the time, but positively primitive from our standpoint. People were focused on conquering infectious diseases and didn't have much time to worry about people feeling blue. There weren't many specialists in medical care, it was just really basic care.

Depressed old guy was a mean old bastard. Anxiety-ridden housewife was "hysterical". Then the science got better, along with the understanding of brain chemistry and an organic cause for depression and anxiety. The identification of the organic causes led to the the development of drugs to "fix" it. The development of drugs to fix it led to more diagnoses, due to increased general knowledge as well as the possibility of hope for a patient as well as money to be made from the diagnosis and the treatment. So I think these things go hand-in-hand.

Now, I suspect that these diagnoses have exploded in part due to dissemination of information over the internet, not to mention the infamous ads run by pharmaceutical companies. Also, there are so many subspecialties now where people can ponder the esoteric details of their field instead of being just broad-based family doc type of people. But this all goes back to the fact that the organic causes of depression and anxiety are understood better than they were.

I also think that again our biological wiring is just all wrong for how we live in developed countries. This is waaay out there, but maybe depression and anxiety are biological cues that we are "doing something wrong" by not being out trying to survive and doing those things that we had to do to survive.

And now I've just cured the insomniacs. Nighty night!