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 illn