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It's A Sadness
Depression is considered by many - laymen and psychiatrists and family doctors - as the most prevalent 'illness' of this century.
In Britain, over 31 million prescriptions for 'anti-depressants' were issued last year. A record high for those feeling low.
But, there is a new (or old) argument published in a recent book: 'The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder'.
This soul-searching research by Allan Horwitz, professor of sociology at Rutgers University and Jerome Wakefield, professor of social work at New York University, amounts to one conclusion: It may not be depression; it may be sadness.
To say someone is 'sad' is out of fashion. However, sadness seems always to have existed. All cultures experience sorrow. Inumerable songs, books, plays and films portray the sentiment.
To add insult to injury, the manufacturers of the famous anti-depressant medicine, Prozac, (Eli Lilly and Company of Indianapolis, Indiana, and affiliates Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline) have coined enough money over the past twenty years to send any shareholder laughing all the way to the First National Bank of Indiana.
Mark Rapley, professor of clinical psychology at the University of East London, says, "What I object to is the intellectual trickery and how the drugs industry has made us believe that when we feel sad we have something fundamentally wrong with us that needs correcting".
So, the next time you are in a blue period, remember what Victor Hugo wrote: Melancholy is "the pleasure of being sad".
