Manufacturing depression Read Online Free PDF

understand that when you’re lying on the floor of your study and it feels as if someone has turned up the gravity, you’re in the throes of a disease as frank and indisputable as, say, appendicitis—and that you are just as much at risk as you would be if you ignored that pain in your lower abdomen. Kramer confessed to having fallen prey to this ideology himself—not as a practicing melancholic, but a practicing psychiatrist. He learned this, hewrote, from a patient who, once the drugs had kicked in, chided him for paying too much attention to what her depression might actually mean. But he reeducated himself, and in his book urged the rest of us—doctors and patients alike—to do the same.
    We are on the brink of an epochal shift, Kramer went on—to a time when “ the eradication of depression [will] seem unremarkable as a…social goal.” Only one thing stands in the way of achieving that goal, Kramer wrote: ignorance. It takes many forms, but one of them is people like me and the other critics of the depression industry who are, according to
Against Depression,
unwittingly in thrall to that colonial power and who therefore insist on pointing out certain facts. Like, for instance, that the prevalence of depression magically skyrocketed just after the drug industry introduced the SSRIs, that the diagnostic criteria underlying this increase can’t distinguish between grief and depression, and that as a result the diagnosis threatens to swallow everyday sorrows. People who continue to believe these things, as the title of his book implies, must be, wittingly or not,
for
depression.
    At the risk of sounding like the man who says no when asked if he’s still beating his wife, I’ll tell you that I’m really not on the side of the suffering that afflicted Evelyn and Ann and killed Barbara, the kind that drives people to their knees, or their beds, for months or years at a time. In fact, I’m not in favor of suffering at all. By criticizing the idea of depression as a disease, I’m not wishing anguish upon us. (Nor do I think that we need to safeguard pain against the depression doctors’ attempts to do away with it; something tells me that psychic suffering will never be in short supply.) Pain, psychological and otherwise, is just a brute fact, neither noble nor evil, neither redemption nor scourge. It may play some important evolutionary role—designed, perhaps, to alert us to the fact that something is wrong or to create the necessity for invention—but it’s not hard to imagine a different mechanism fulfilling these functions, one that doesn’t hurt so much.
    The division of the world into forces in favor of and againstdepression is as false as every other Manichaean scheme. Everyone is against depression, just as everyone is against war and child abuse and global warming. The argument is really over
who
is depressed, which is to say over whose inner life gets pathologized under the new depression regime and what the depressed people are going to do about it. That’s why it’s important to figure out just what the depression doctors mean by the diagnosis and where that meaning came from: because there are burdens to being declared ill. Unless you are a drug company, in which case the only burden of a widespread illness for which you own the treatment is figuring out what to do with the profits.
    I wish I could tell you that this very lucrative notion about unhappiness has been brought to us by the marketing departments of the big drug companies. That would make convincing you to resist it an easier job. But while I will tell you plenty of stories about shrewd and sometimes questionable corporate behavior, proving that drug companies will do what they have to do in order to sell their product is no more or less illuminating than uncovering gambling in Casablanca. It’s worth noting when the usual suspects behave suspiciously—when, for instance, a website like depressionisreal.org is funded by Big