Malignant Sadness: The Anatomy of Depression

Depression is to sadness what cancer is to normal cell division, says Wolpert, a British biologist. Hence ""malignant sadness,"" or depression, is sadness gone out of control. Unfortunately, this primer on depression for sufferers and those who care about them is for the most part as dry and clinical as a medical textbook. After an all-too-brief and moving description of his own experience with ""malignant sadness,"" Wolpert takes a brief walk through medicine's knowledge of depression, then embarks on a detailed discussion of how depression is defined in the psychiatric handbook, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. In two provocative chapters, Wolpert discusses whether depression is a malady specific to the West, or whether it is found in all societies around the world (in general, his answer is that it exists in non-Western cultures but that there it tends to be expressed in physical rather than emotional symptoms). In a very thorough but dull chapter on who is susceptible to depression, he rattles off the results of study after study with little examination; some of the findings are familiar (women are more susceptible to depression than men, depression is to a large extent hereditary), others less so (postpartum depression has been found in cultures as different as Malaysia, Japan and Brazil). Wolpert does a thorough job of presenting all the important topics, from the biological roots of depression to its various treatments and their effectiveness, but much of this material is covered with more grace and warmth by Peter Kramer in Listening to Prozac and in Peter Whybrow's A Mood Apart. Agent, Anne Engel. (Mar.)