Theodore Dalrymple archive at The New English Review.

From "An Ill for Every Pill":

Unfortunately, Prozac came on to the market just at the time when another product of a rather crude and reductive theory, or attitude, the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of the American Psychiatric Association, became the object of almost universal superstitious awe and veneration. Here I rely on a brilliant book published last year by two professors of sociology, Allan V Horwitz and Jerome C Wakefield, entitled The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder. They point out what should have been obvious to any person with the most minimal knowledge of human nature, that the definition of depression in that manual is complete disassociated human mood from the actual lived circumstances in which it was experienced. It was sufficient to be diagnosed from depression to have a certain number of symptoms for a certain length of time: two whole weeks!

This not only was a retrogression in our understanding of human life by comparison with that held in the past by almost everyone, including psychiatrists, but had the effect of turning practically the whole of the human race into psychiatric casualties. The World Health Organization has recently stated that depression is the condition which imposes the second greatest burden of illness and disability on mankind, to believe which requires more suspension of critical faculties than to believe that Peter Pan is a real person, or that Father Christmas is currently in Lapland preparing for his next forays down our chimneys.