Alain Ehrenberg

Weariness of the Self (eBook, PDF)

Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age

• Format: PDF

Produktbeschreibung

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 illness that clarifies the intertwining relationship between its diagnostic history and changes in social norms and values. The first book to offer both a global sociological view of contemporary depression and a detailed description of psychiatric reasoning and its transformation - from the invention of electroshock therapy to mass consumption of Prozac - The Weariness of the Self offers a compelling exploration of depression as social fact.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Seitenzahl: 345
• Erscheinungstermin: 20. Dezember 2009
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780773577152
• Artikelnr.: 52963634

Autorenporträt

Alain Ehrenberg is research director emeritus at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), Paris.