The Medicated Americans: Antidepressant Prescriptions on the Rise
Charlie Barber writes for Scientific American about depression, and the conflation of depression (feeling down, a little sad, not quite yourself) and Depression (major depressive disorder, rendering a person constantly sad yet so apathetic that they often can’t even muster the energy to kill themselves).
It is as if from the early 1990s on (nicely coinciding with the mass penetration of Prozac), we have been living in the Age of Depression—just as Valium arrived in, or helped to create, the Age of Anxiety. In contemporary America, it has been broadly accepted for some time that everybody, at some level, is depressed at least some of the time. As Americans have become more aware of their feelings in the past few therapy-oriented decades, it has become acceptable and eminently appropriate to say when someone asks how you are feeling (particularly if it’s late March): “A little depressed.” Or to respond to the query, “How was the movie the other day?”: “A little depressing.” Or to say in response to “How did you feel about last year’s minuscule raise?”: “Depressed.”
But to anyone reasonably experienced in the mental health field, there is depression and then there is Depression. The first type is a terribly broad and bland term, indicating “the blues,” “feeling down,” “bummed out,” “in the dumps,” “low,” “a little tired,” “not quite myself,” each a standard part of the daily human predicament. Major depressive disorder, however, is a harrowing and indisputably profound and serious medical condition. To confuse the two, depression with Depression, is to compare a gentle spring rain to a vengeful typhoon.
