Are We Living in the Age of Angst?

Medical historian Edward Shorter thinks we certainly might be—and that much of the blame can be laid on psychiatrists:

Shorter believes that the increase in depression is more a problem of an expanding diagnosis and a surge in self-labeling than a genuine epidemic. Serious mental illness certainly exists, but is often misdiagnosed and ineffectively treated with Prozac-type drugs. He indignantly concludes that "psychiatry’s inability to stop the depression epidemic is an appalling story of the collective failure of a scientific discipline to ward off a public-health disaster." Abdication to Big Pharma "means that poorly diagnosed patients are denied the benefit of proper treatment." Ironically, however, Shorter’s solution to the disaster is not a return to the holistic concept of nerves, but the development of new and better drugs.