Here's another book review by Laura Miller (who reviewed "Dianetics" in this series. It's called "Van Gogh on Prozac" and discusses a recent book by Peter Kramer called "Against Depression." He is a professor of psychiatry whose his first book, "Listening to Prozac" was a landmark bestseller.

http://www.salon.com/books/review/2005/05/23/kramer/index.html

"Against Depression"
By Peter Kramer
Viking Books
368 pages
Nonfiction

We'd have no compunction about enthusiastically endorsing a plan to wipe out diabetes, cancer or malaria, but when Kramer began asking people if they'd support the "eradication" of depression, "invariably, the response was hedged." They asked for precise definitions and expressed "protective worries" about utopian plans to change "human nature."

If you unpack the glibness of the van Gogh question, the implications are obvious. The painter suffered greatly from (probably) both depression and epilepsy, and his art strikes us as intimately concerned with those two, intertwined afflictions. Would the paintings be less revelatory if van Gogh himself were not so miserable? Would they even exist at all? Depression, in many people's minds, is integral to the creative temperament. We might lose some of the triumphs of art and culture if it were wiped away.

Kramer, who clearly longs to participate in the grand tradition of Western "seriousness," finds himself objecting, conscientiously, on the grounds that the tradition idealizes depression. He stops a little short of accusing it of frankly collaborating with the disease, but the case can definitely be made. One of the most dangerous aspects of depression, now that there are increasingly better ways of treating it, is its ability to persuade us that it is not a disease. To help the devil in his deception is to be complicit in his crimes....

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