With an attention span as short as mine, it is rare I find myself thinking about a subject long enough for it to depress me. However, across the world, 450 million people suffer from mental health problems and in the next twenty years, according to the World Health Organisation, depression will become the single largest health burden on society. Given these numbers, perhaps it is no surprise that experts have begun to challenge both the definition of the problem and the notion that medication is its best solution.
American psychotherapist Gary Greenberg has stepped in with Manufacturing Depression, a thorough, often shocking history of how the pharmaceutical industry has pathologised misery in order to sell us the cure. Greenberg includes frank and funny accounts of his own battle with depression and deals principally with the US healthcare system. However, his argument and detailed evidence make it vital reading for anyone who has ever been squeezed through the machinery of depression treatments or who simply has a healthy scepticism about the influence of Big Pharma.
In western society, to suggest that depression is part of our psychic landscape, and that in trying to eliminate it we risk losing something crucial to our humanity, is a heresy. But this engaging and necessary book is a rallying cry to resist the pathologising of emotion for profit. Greenberg is asking us to step back from neuroscience and take a more philosophical look at what it means to live now.Pessimism, he suggests, may be a correct response to times of crisis and a spur to action. "Regardless of whether or not the drugs work, to call pessimism the symptom of an illness and then turn our discontents over to the medical industry is to surrender perhaps the most important portion of our autonomy: the ability to look around and say… 'This is outrageous. Something must be done.'"
