The Errant Æsthete

Out of Scientific American: Close to 10 percent of men and women in America are now taking drugs to combat depression. How did a once rare condition become so common?

It is as if from the early 1990s on (nicely coinciding with the mass penetration of Prozac), we have been living in the Age of Depression—just as Valium arrived in, or helped to create, the Age of Anxiety. In contemporary America, it has been broadly accepted for some time that everybody, at some level, is depressed at least some of the time. As Americans have become more aware of their feelings in the past few therapy-oriented decades, it has become acceptable and eminently appropriate to say when someone asks how you are feeling (particularly if it’s late March): “A little depressed.” Or to respond to the query, “How was the movie the other day?”: “A little depressing.”