How Everyone Became Depressed

Reflecting the conventional psychoanalytic wisdom of the day, Goldstein attributed all his problems to an overbearing mother and a weak father. This is nonsense. He had a biological brain disease, and much of the opprobrium that rained down on him reflected ignorance that at times he was simply out of control.

This is one of the big questions in psychology: When we experience sexual desires that are new to us, is it because our brains have just become activated for that particular desire, which slumbered latently all along?

Many observers are inclined to see a causal link here: the flood tide of medications may be causing teen suicides. I’m not so sure. What we’re seeing is probably not a paradoxical effect of medication but the undertreatment of depression.

Erotomania may mean the fixed false idea that someone is in love with you, and that she is prevented from declaring her love. This could be dismissed as a relatively harmless though annoying belief, except for the fact that erotomaniacs can turn vengefully upon the love object after perceiving themselves as rejected.

Psychiatry

Psychiatry Headed into the Future or Off a Cliff?

Edward Shorter Ph.D. on June 27, 2015

Two Chinese investigators at Shanxi Medical University have recently tried to assess highlights in psychiatry since the 1960s.

Two Chinese investigators at Shanxi Medical University have recently tried to assess highlights in psychiatry since the 1960s.

Nash was certainly delusional and evidently hallucinated as well. He filled the blackboards of Fine Hall at Princeton with indecipherable scribblings, and wandered about the campus in an apparent daze. He became known as “The Phantom of Fine Hall.”

Psychiatry is rapidly losing faith in the DSM. The National Institute for Mental Health has already rejected it as a symptom guide for research.

To be clear, we have known since the early 19th century that there is a form of manic excitement, or “manic delirium,” that may end fatally.

There was never any valid scientific evidence showing clinical depression was associated with lowered levels of serotonin: It was all smoke and mirrors. But such is the power of Big Pharma – and such is the power of a good story – that many academics bought into it, and careers were built on the concept of lowered serotonin causing depression.

Many patients with severe, melancholic depression dissimulate and pretend that everything is fine so that family and caregivers will not block their suicidal plans. This danger of dissimulation in severe depression is something that psychiatrists have always known about.

On March 9, on a Monday afternoon in DeKalb County, Georgia, Anthony Hill, a black Air Force veteran in postdeployment from Afghanistan, removed all his clothes, slid down from the balcony of his second-floor apartment, and began walking.

Women are increasingly comfortable with porn use--as are many others—given that porn viewing has become increasingly prevalent via the web. As a result, not only are women watching more porn, their comfort in so doing creates an increasing willingness to say so in a survey.

Almost forty years after the publication in 1980 of the epic third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association, it is starting to become apparent that psychiatry made a historic mistake in getting rid of its traditional three or four depressive illnesses.

In the way that lives were once ruined with such toxic diagnoses as ovarian hysteria, lives today are ruined by CFS.

Depression

Depression as a Role for Women?

Edward Shorter Ph.D. on February 16, 2015

Today, we cluck about depression—and few realize that we are cultivating a culture that systematically invalidates women. If you are “depressed,” you aren’t a whole person. You have a disability, a handicap that disadvantages you vis-à-vis men, who generally are not depressed.

Today, we cluck about depression—and few realize that we are cultivating a culture that systematically invalidates women. If you are “depressed,” you aren’t a whole person. You have a disability, a handicap that disadvantages you vis-à-vis men, who generally are not depressed.

In the world of sex, there is indeed something new under the sun.

Some people will view these changes with horror. Others will delight in them. But there is no doubt that we are looking at the future.

According to the latest statistics from the US government, in the years 2001-04, on a “lifetime” basis, half (49.5 percent) of all US adolescents aged 13 to 18 have a “mental health disorder.”

In the current issue of the journal History of Psychiatry, Mark Micale, who teaches psychiatric history at the University of Illinois and is one of the most important international figures in the field, answers the question, “What have been the ten most important changes in psychiatry since World War II?”

On Oct 16 an enthusiastic piece was published in the Scientific American on “The Rise of All-Purpose Antidepressants.” It was simply thrilling, the author noted, that Prozac and its cousins turned out to be effective, not just in depression, but...