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On Depression

Drugs, Diagnosis, and Despair in the Modern World

Nassir Ghaemi

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Lasting happiness comes not from chasing the American dream but from living an authentic life—which includes despair.

In a culture obsessed with youth, financial success, and achieving happiness, is it possible to live an authentic, meaningful life? Nassir Ghaemi, director of the Mood Disorder Program at Tufts Medical Center, reflects on our society's current quest for happiness and rejection of any emotion resembling sadness. On Depression asks readers to consider the benefits of despair and the foibles of an unexamined life.

Too often depression as disease is mistreated or not treated at all...

Lasting happiness comes not from chasing the American dream but from living an authentic life—which includes despair.

In a culture obsessed with youth, financial success, and achieving happiness, is it possible to live an authentic, meaningful life? Nassir Ghaemi, director of the Mood Disorder Program at Tufts Medical Center, reflects on our society's current quest for happiness and rejection of any emotion resembling sadness. On Depression asks readers to consider the benefits of despair and the foibles of an unexamined life.

Too often depression as disease is mistreated or not treated at all. Ghaemi warns against the "pretenders" who confuse our understanding of depression—both those who deny disease and those who use psychiatric diagnosis "pragmatically" or unscientifically. But experiencing sadness, even depression, can also have benefits. Ghaemi asserts that we can create a "narrative of ourselves such that we know and accept who we are," leading to a deeper, lasting level of contentment and a more satisfying personal and public life.

Depression is complex, and we need guides to help us understand it, guides who comprehend it existentially as part of normal human experience and clinically as sometimes needing the right kind of treatment, including medications. Ghaemi discusses these guides in detail, thinkers like Viktor Frankl, Rollo May, Karl Jaspers, and Leston Havens, among others.

On Depression combines examples from philosophy and the history of medicine with psychiatric principles informed by the author's clinical experience with people who struggle with mental illness. He has seen great achievements arise from great suffering and feels that understanding depression can provide important insights into happiness.

Reviews

Reviews

An informed, challenging, and readable approach to a vital subject. Despair is in the title, but readers will rejoice in the reading.

Ghaemi is a lucid and eminently reasonable writer.

[On Depression] belongs in libraries serving graduate students of psychiatry, psychology, and, perhaps, philosophy.

Clearly written, with mercifully short chapters for the uninitiated reader, Ghaemi's book elucidates how many of us already feel about the current construction of mood disorders, without having been able to articulate our misgivings.

This is a fun and stimulating read for anyone interested in depression and other mood disorders.

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Book Details

Table of Contents

Preface
Part I: Entrance
1. Lives of Quiet Desperation
2. The Varieties of Depressive Experience
3. Abnormal Happiness
4. The Age of Prozac
5. The Unknown Hippocrates
Part II: Pretenders
6. Postmodernism

Preface
Part I: Entrance
1. Lives of Quiet Desperation
2. The Varieties of Depressive Experience
3. Abnormal Happiness
4. The Age of Prozac
5. The Unknown Hippocrates
Part II: Pretenders
6. Postmodernism Debunked
7. Pharmageddon?
8. Creating Major Depressive Disorder
9. The DSM Wars
Part III: Guides
10. Viktor Frankl: Learning to Suffer
11. Rollo May and Elvin Semrad: I Am, We Are
12. Leston Havens: Holding Opposed Ideas at Once
13. Paul Roazen: Being Honest about the Past
14. Karl Jaspers: Keeping Faith
Part IV: Exit
15. The Banality of Normality
16. Two O'clock in the Morning
Acknowledgments
Appendix: Listening to Despair: An Interview by Leston Havens
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Author Bio
S. Nassir Ghaemi, MD, MPH
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S. Nassir Ghaemi, MD, MPH

S. Nassir Ghaemi, M.D., M.P.H., is a professor of psychiatry at Tufts University School of Medicine and director of the Mood Disorders Program at the Tufts Medical Center in Boston. He also serves on the faculty of Harvard Medical School. He has written several books including Mood Disorders: A Practical Guide; A Clinician's Guide to Statistics and Epidemiology in Mental Health: Measuring Truth...