Head Case

The National Institute of Mental Health estimates that more than fourteen million Americans suffer from major depression every year, and more than three million suffer from minor depression (whose symptoms are milder but last longer than two years). Greenberg thinks that numbers like these are ridiculous—not because people aren’t depressed but because, in most cases, their depression is not a mental illness. It’s a sane response to a crazy world.

Greenberg basically regards the pathologizing of melancholy and despair, and the invention of pills designed to relieve people of those feelings, as a vast capitalist conspiracy to paste a big smiley face over a world that we have good reason to feel sick about. The aim of the conspiracy is to convince us that it’s all in our heads, or, specifically, in our brains—that our unhappiness is a chemical problem, not an existential one.


Greenberg is repeating a common criticism of contemporary psychiatry, which is that the profession is creating ever more expansive criteria for mental illness that end up labeling as sick people who are just different...


In 1949, Philip Ash, an American psychologist, published a study in which he had fifty-two mental patients examined by three psychiatrists, two of them, according to Ash, nationally known. All the psychiatrists reached the same diagnosis only twenty per cent of the time, and two were in agreement less than half the time.



In 1952, a British psychologist, Hans Eysenck, published a summary of several studies assessing the effectiveness of psychotherapy. “There . . . appears to be an inverse correlation between recovery and psychotherapy,” Eysenck dryly noted. “The more psychotherapy, the smaller the recovery rate.”


But do we think that people who are naturally fearless lack character? We usually think the opposite. Yet those people are just born lucky. Why should the rest of us have to pay a price in dread, shame, and stomach aches to achieve a state of being that they enjoy for nothing?

- Head Case

курсив мой, ясное дело. и сравни с этим кретином в оптимистическом духе nyt: Depression’s Upside