McGill-Queen's University Press Alain Ehrenberg The Weariness of the Self Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age
Health, Psychotropics and Society, Paris Descartes University), senior researcher at
CNRS, and the author of several books on contemporary individualism.
McGill-Queen's University Press
Alain Ehrenberg
The Weariness
of the Self
Diagnosing the History of Depression
in the Contemporary Age
Depression, once a subfield of neurosis,
has become the most diagnosed mental
disorder in the world. Why and how has
depression become such a topical illness
and what does it tell us about changing
ideas of the individual and society?
Alain Ehrenberg investigates the history of depression and depressive symptoms
across twentieth-century psychiatry, showing that identifying depression is far more
difficult than a simple diagnostic distinction between normal and pathological
sadness - the one constant in the history of depression is its changing definition.
Drawing on the accumulated knowledge of a lifetime devoted to the study of the
individual in modern democratic society, Ehrenberg shows that the phenomenon
of modern depression is not a construction of the pharmaceutical industry but a
pathology arising from inadequacy in a social context where success is attributed
to, and expected of, the autonomous individual. In so doing, he provides both
a novel and convincing description of the illness that clarifies the intertwining
relationship between its diagnostic history and changes in social norms and values.
The first book to offer both a global sociological view of contemporary depression
and a detailed description of psychiatric reasoning and its transformation - from
the invention of electroshock therapy to mass consumption of Prozac - The
Weariness of the Self offers a compelling exploration of depression as social fact.