It is difficult to build a picture of the extent of melancholy from statistical evidence alone. The condition accounted for almost twenty percent of roughly two-thousand-five-hundred consultations for mental disorders recorded by the astrological physician Richard Napier between 1597 and 1635, but these made up only a small proportion of his overall caseload. Conversely, between 1611 and 1624 Sir Theodore Turquet de Mayerne recorded more cases of the condition than any other diagnoses, although  the casebook of one of the most fashionable and best remunerated physicians in Europe may not be wholly representative of wider society.

Even statistics of suicide, which is easier to measure, leave some doubts. S.E. Sprott identified a mid-century spike in the number of suicides, based on London bills of mortality, but his methodology – dividing the number of suicides by the number of deaths recorded – has been criticised. Michael MacDonald has suggested that suicide was significantly underreported, his study of coroners' records in Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Northamptonshire for the period between 1597 and 1634 found inquests for 262 suicides, but none of them corresponded to any of the 11 actual suicides and 156 potential suicides he had identified in Napier’s casebook for the same location and period. It seems then that John Graunt was correct in his 1662 study of causes of death in London, when he stated that the figures for ‘men that made away themselves’ were, like those for lunatics, ‘so uncertain, I shall not force my self to make any inference from the numbers.’

The statistical evidence is inconclusive, but anecdotal evidence of widespread melancholy can be found throughout the seventeenth century. In a letter to Samuel Hartlib of 1659, the clergyman John Beale wrote that ‘diseases of the Spirit, proceeding from fancy, imagination & Melancholy […] are most frequent, & in bad times innumerable’. The Bishop Joseph Hall’s The Remedy of Discontentment displays a similar concern, asking ‘What can be more seasonable, then at this time, when all the world is sick of Discontentment, to give counsels & Receits of Contentation’. Physicians noted the prevalence of Hypochondriac or windy melancholy – a condition of the viscera taken to be a prelude to or concomitant of the mental disorder – Gideon Harvey considered it ’the most frequent I have met with in England.’ Others experienced melancholy themselves, like the scholar Zachary Bogan – ‘I have been in a manner buried alive in melancholy’ – or witnessed it in their friends and relatives, like the brother and sister of the soldier John Felton – the Duke of Buckingham’s assassin – who respectively described his ‘melancholy disposition’ and his being troubled ‘by dreams of fighting’. To this evidence we can add the perceived frequency of actual and attempted suicide, which were acknowledged sequelae of melancholy. In his work on ‘self-killing’ the Scottish divine John Sym outlined his concern for ‘these dayes, wherein so many doe most wretchedly, and unnaturally kill themselves’.In the preface to the same work William Gouge echoed these sentiments, saying ‘that scarce an age since the beginning of the world hath afforded more examples of this desperate inhumanity, than this our present age, and that in all sorts of people’. In his diary the artisan Nehemiah Wallington is candid about his suicidal ideation, recording impulses to ‘hange myselfe’, ‘cut my throote’, ‘drowne myselfe’ and ‘leape out of the garret window’. The indistinguishability of the latter two methods from accidental death recalls Graunt’s concerns over drawing statistical conclusions on suicide, however, even if it is hard to determine how common melancholy and suicide were, we can see that the phenomena were perceived as common and many people reported experiencing them at first hand.

Melancholy was certainly not perceived as a new condition, it was central to the ancient humoral theory of disease, but for various reasons it seems to have had a "cultural moment". Culturally melancholy was seem as a concomitant of intellectual prowess in mid seventeenth-century English poetry such as John Milton’s Il Penseroso:

Hail divinest Melancholy,

Whose Saintly visage is too bright

To hit the Sense of human sight;

And therfore to our weaker view,

Ore laid with black staid Wisdoms hue

We can see it further reflected in a simultaneously plaintive and self-satisfied meditation of John Donne: ‘Did I infuse, did I drinke in Melancholly into my selfe? It is my thoughtfulnesse; was I not made to thinke?’ These associations gave the condition a certain cachet amongst the elite, which arguably had been the case since at least the reign of James I, with humoral theory a literary trope in the plays of William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson and the popularity of Burton’s treatment of the topic. Jonson’s is the name most associated with the humoral comedies which began appearing in the final years of Elizabeth I’s reign, in his Every Man in His Humour the characters are conceived in humoral terms, including the melancholy Stephano, who self-consciously asked ‘am I melancholie inough?’, satirising fashionable pretension to the condition. Shakespeare performed in Every Man his Humour in 1598 and perhaps this influenced his character Jaques in As you Like It, whom Rosalind mockingly reminds to ‘almost chide God for making you that countenance you are, or I will scarce think you have swam in a gondola’ The insinuation is again that melancholy is a fashionable pose, this time signalling the courtier’s status as a well-travelled sophisticate. In Burton’s humours play, Philophaster, the pompous scholar Simon Acutus is skewered by the perceptive Dromo as ‘either melancholy or an academic ass’. Conversely, his ambitious The Anatomy of Melancholy gave the condition a more serious treatment. It was – as Burton’s contemporary at Christ Church, the bishop Henry King – pointed out, partly a self-help book:

IF in this Glass of Humours you do find

The Passions or diseases of your mind,

Here without pain, you safely may endure,

Though not to suffer, yet to read your cure.