Volume 48, Number 15 · October 4, 2001
The Crack-Up
By Rosemary Dinnage
The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
by Andrew Solomon
Scribner, 571 pp., $28.00
Where the Roots Reach for Water: A Personal and Natural History of Melancholia
by Jeffery Smith
North Point Press, 292 pp., $13.00 (paper)
The Nature of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva
edited by Jennifer Radden
Oxford University Press, 352 pp., $35.00
Our times have been called, among other things, the Age of Depression: incidence seems constantly to rise, laboratories to bring out more and more new medicines. But in Where the Roots Reach for Water Jeffery Smith argues that it is more an Age of Anti-Depression. The old illness of melancholia, as Jennifer Radden's collection of readings, The Nature of Melancholy, shows, could formerly be taken seriously for its religious or moral meanings. But with religion went some of the legitimation of private grief; instead, what William James (with some skepticism) called 'the religion of healthy-mindedness'[1] has made headway for at least a century, from Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science to New Age fads. (What William could have made of them!) In the cold fluorescent light of the modern workplace, melancholia is unproductive, subversive, anti-capitalist even. 'Cheer up, it may never happen!' is the jocular shout common here in Britain, one directed at me more often than I care to remember. In radio programs of popular classics, Smith notes, movements in a minor key even tend to be deleted (can this really be so?). 'In spite of all available evidence,' he goes on, 'modern-day Americans keep trying to convince ourselves that happiness is the natural state of our species. Our kind was meant to conquer and work and laugh and spend, we believe; not to sit about head in hand.' The stigma of depression is as bad as it ever was.
Review, 4957 words
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