Against depression

Abstract

A decade ago, with Listening to Prozac, Kramer revolutionized the way we think about antidepressants and the culture in which they are so widely used. Now, he returns with a look at the condition those medications treat. Depression, linked in our culture to a long tradition of “heroic melancholy,” is often regarded as ennobling–a source of soulfulness and creativity. Tracing this belief from Aristotle to the Romantics to Picasso, and to present-day memoirs of mood disorder, Kramer suggests that the pervasiveness of the illness has distorted our sense of what it is to be human. There is nothing heroic about depression, he argues, and he presents the latest scientific findings to support the fact that depression is a disease.