Times Online (UK) ran an article entitled, “Sadness: a natural antidote” about a book called The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder by professors Allan Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield. The article (and the book) explains that sorrow is a natural emotion, not a disease, which is being “medicated into oblivion.” The article reports that leading psychiatrist Robert Spitzer, one of the architects of psychiatry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, wrote the forward to the book. According to the article, Spitzer reveals that the book “has caused me to rethink my own position….” It is probably the closest you will ever come to hearing a doctor of Spitzer’s stature admit that he was wrong, says the article. Also reported is that earlier this month, Mark Rapley, professor of clinical psychology at the University of East London, organized a conference entitled “Demedicalising Misery,” featuring speakers who believe that much normal behaviour is wrongly classified as disease, and/or the benefits of antidepressants are oversold. The conference was a sell-out. Rapley regards the current epidemic in depression as a social and cultural one, not a bona fide clinical one. “How is it that we have become so bamboozled that we fail to recognise certain human experiences, such as grief or sadness, for what they are?” Rapley asks. And if depression is just normal sorrow, he rails, it’s reasonable that antidepressants are not correcting some fundamental, underlying brain deficiency.
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