On Depression: Drugs, Diagnosis, and Despair in the Modern World

The key to happiness might be sadness—or maybe we need to expand our definition of “happiness” to include more introspectively low states, argues Tufts University psychiatry professor Ghaemi (A First-Rate Madness) in this scientific and philosophical treatise on depression. The author blames our culture of widespread discontent on two phenomena: the death of God and postmodernism. The former has made us to feel purposeless, while the latter has undermined psychiatric nosology by blurring the line between physical and existential symptoms. These cultural malaises have combined with overly prescriptive psychiatric practices to disastrous effect. Ghaemi spends the first part of the book outlining the intricacies of this large-scale problem before going on to profile several thinkers, or “guides” (including Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl), whose wisdom he believes can lead individuals toward a clearer understanding of themselves and their experiences of happiness and sadness. Ghaemi acknowledges that drugs do work for some people, and though his ideas about the necessity of pain and sitting through suffering are nothing new, his theory that understanding happiness requires accepting its impossibility—or at least embracing our time in the trenches—presents our darker moods in a more optimistic light. (July)