How Everyone Became Depressed Read Online Free PDF

survey: “We found, among people who were not necessarily attending their doctors, a sub-clinical neurosis syndrome. The symptoms, which tend to cluster, are: mild depression; undue irritability; ‘nerves’ or excessive nervousness, and insomnia. This group constitutes about 30 per cent of the population.” 27
    Nervousness also seemed quite well represented in the United States. When Herbert Berger began practicing family medicine in the early 1930s in “a semirural community,” he said that he had “the certainty that I lived in a belt of inbred neurotics . . . It felt fairly certain that the residents of my community had intermarried (with some poor stock to begin with) and that this explained the large number of functionally incompetent individuals whom I met.” But now on Staten Island in 1956 as an internist, Berger said, “I see even more neurotic personalities.” “Gradually I have come to recognize that these individuals never wish to be told that they are just nervous. The word ‘imagination’ is anathema to them for they are certain that they are seriously ill, and they expect and demand that the physician treat their disease with considerable respect. It is often necessary to medicate these people.” The remark lets us understand why the flood of psychoactive drugs—Miltown (meprobamate) being the first blockbuster in 1955—was received with such gratitude by community physicians. In rural New York, and on Staten Island, nervousness was as common as in rural Germany. Berger had to explain to his patients time and again that “This is not insanity and that nervous individuals never become insane.” 28
    Today in the United States, epidemiological surveys conducted on a doorto-door basis by the federal government at the national level show that about one American in seven is “nervous,” whereby respondents were left to define nervous themselves: In 2010 19.4% of the population told interviewers they had “nervousness either all of the time or some of the time” (18.0% of the men and 20.6% of the women): one woman in five! 29 For people in general, the concept of nervousness remains very much a reality.
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The Rise of Nervous Illness
    It is much better, people think, for the nerves than the mind to be ill. The nerves are physical structures, and heal in the way that all integuments of the body heal naturally. Disorders of the mind are frightening because they are so intangible, and, we think, may well lead to insanity rather than recovery. From time out of mind, people have privileged nervous illness over mental illness.
    From time out of mind, societies have had expressions for the varieties of frets, anxieties, and dyspepsias to which the flesh is heir. In France and England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, one term was “vapours,” a reference from humoral medicine to supposed exhalations of the viscera that would rise in the body to affect the brain. A major apostle was London physician John Purcell, writing in 1702, of “those who have laboured long under this distemper, [who] are oppressed with a dreadful anguish of mind and a deep melancholy, always reflecting on what can perplex, terrify, and disorder them most, so that at last they think their recovery impossible, and are very angry with those who pretend there is any hopes of it.” 1 He emphasized melancholia and anguish, and for him the “vapours” were something more than a mild attack of the frets.
    But this was not for everyone. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, now 60 and living in exile in Italy, described to her estranged husband in 1749 Italian health care arrangements, and how physicians visited rich and poor alike. “This last article would be very hard if we had as many vapourish ladies as in England, but those imaginary ills are entirely unknown here. When I recollect the vast fortunes raised by doctors amongst us [in England], and the eager pursuit after every new piece of quackery that is introduced, I cannot