How Everyone Became Depressed: The Rise and Fall of the Nervous Breakdown

In this fascinating history, Shorter (Before Prozac) casts light on a subject that is just as captivating as it is devastatingly dark. It’s also elusive: as depression diagnosis rates rise, what it means to be depressed becomes increasingly unclear. And while Shorter’s investigation into sadness—with chapters devoted to anxiety, fatigue, and melancholia—occasionally reads like the DSM-IV (V will be published in 2013), his text is grounded more in the history of medicine than in diagnostic technique. A historian by profession, Shorter writes about 19th- and 20th-century theories of depression in terms of the divide between body and mind, advancing the argument that a significant shift in emphasis from the former to the latter was fostered by Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theories. Famous patients, too, make their way into the discussion: stories about Mary Wollstonecraft and the poet William Cowper demonstrate the degree to which mental breakdowns vary across sufferers. It is easy to feel lost amid such wide-ranging discussion, but Shorter ends by advocating for a pre-Freudian focus on the body in a way that ties his previous chapters together and has potentially healing implications for modern sufferers. Agent: Beverley Slopen, Beverley Slopen Agency. (Mar.)