Content area
Full Text
Nassir Ghaemi. On Depression: Drugs, Diagnosis, and Despair in the Modern World. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. ix + 215 pp. $24.95 (978-14214-0933-7).
Nassir Ghaemi's primer on existentialist psychiatry, On Depression: Drugs, Diagnosis, and Despair in the Modern World, is a thoughtful, ambitious, and flawed effort to persuade Americans (and their psychiatrists) that suffering is an important element of a meaningful life.
The book begins in familiar territory with a critique of today's expansive definitions of depression as illness. Ghaemi, a professor of psychiatry, director of a mood disorder program, and author of previous best sellers on madness and psychiatry, acknowledges that true depression ("depression disease") is biological and should therefore be treated with medication. But, he argues, most depression-the kind that "is not episodic, that is chronic and admixed with anxiety"-does not have biological causes and is therefore not a disease ("depression nondisease"; p. 14). Moreover, he points out in a welcome (if brief) chapter on "Abnormal Happiness," not all happiness is desirable either. Mania can be debilitating, and psychiatrists, he fears, may be fostering it by prescribing Prozac to people with nondisease depression (p. 41). Ghaemi...