Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
How Everyone Became Depressed C

How Everyone Became Depressed C

Shorter

Hardcover

Medical ReferenceMental Health

ISBN10: 0199948089
ISBN13: 9780199948086
Publisher: Academic
Published: Mar 1 2013
Pages: 272
Weight: 1.20
Height: 1.10 Width: 6.10 Depth: 9.30
Language: English
About one American in five receives a diagnosis of major depression over the course of a lifetime. That's despite the fact that many such patients have no mood disorder; they're not sad, but suffer from anxiety, fatigue, insomnia, or a tendency to obsess about the whole business. There is a term for what they have, writes Edward Shorter, and it's a good old-fashioned term that has gone out of use. They have nerves.

In How Everyone Became Depressed, Edward Shorter, a distinguished professor of psychiatry and the history of medicine argues for a return to the old fashioned concept of nervous illness. These are, he writes, diseases of the entire body, not the mind, and as was recognized as early as the 1600s. Shorter traces the evolution of the concept of nerves and the nervous breakdown in western medical thought. He points to a great paradigm shift in the first third of the twentieth century, driven especially by Freud, that transferred behavioral disorders from neurology to psychiatry, spotlighting the mind, not the body. The catch-all term depression now applies to virtually everything, a jumble of non-disease entities, created by political infighting within psychiatry, by competitive struggles in the pharmaceutical industry, and by the whimsy of the regulators. Depression is a real and very serious illness, he argues; it should not be diagnosed so promiscuously, and certainly not

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