Depression. Or, “clinical depression.” Whatever you call it, it seems to be everywhere, these days.

Go into any bookstore, and you see dozens of volumes on depression, in the self-help or psychology sections. Ditto for many libraries. Watch television or listen to radio, and you’ll hear commercials for antidepressant medications. Read the newspaper and listen to the news, and you’ll hear about new depression treatments, or alternative forms of treatment which aren’t so new.

Depression is all around us. Why is that? Are we as a society more depressed now than ever before? Or have we simply learned to recognize depression more often, when it happens? Or is depression just something that the pharmaceutical companies and the psychotherapy industry have cooked up, in order to make money?

Unfortunately, I can’t answer any of these questions. While I am sure there’s no corporate conspiracy involved, the other questions are all beyond my expertise. What’s worse, they’re beyond anyone’s expertise!

For all that we know about clinical depression, and as prevalent as depression seems to be, no one really knows where it comes from, or how to cure it. All anyone can do — even professionals in psychiatry — is flail away at it, and hope by sheer luck to hit some formula for success, for each individual patient.

As for depression and society … if we don’t have a handle on what causes it, and how it works, individually, we’ll never know what its relationship to society at large is.

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