BookBrowse Reviews Against Depression: An eloquent case for considering depression a disease.

From the book jacket: Depression, linked in our culture to a long tradition of “heroic melancholy,” is often understood as ennobling—a source of soulfulness and creativity. Tracing this belief from Aristotle to the Romantics to Picasso, and to present-day memoirs of mood disorder, Kramer suggests that the pervasiveness of the illness has distorted our sense of what it is to be human. There is nothing heroic about depression, Kramer argues, and he presents the latest scientific findings to support the fact that depression is a disease—one that can have far-reaching health effects on its sufferers.

Comment: Kramer says that when he was on tour with Listening to Prozac one question, or variation on a question, kept coming up - what if Prozac had been available in van Gogh's time?  In Against Depression Kramer...