Classifying depression as an illness serves the psychiatric community and pharmaceutical corporations well; it also soothes the frightened, guilty, indifferent, busy, sadistic, and unschooled. To understand depression as a call for life-changes is not profitable. Stagnation is not a medical term. The 17.5 million Americans diagnosed as suffering a major depression in 1997 were mostly damned. (Psychobiological examinations confuse cause and symptom.) Deficient serotonergic functioning, ventral prefrontal cerebral cortex, dis-inhibition of impulsive-aggressive behavior, blah blah blah: the medical lexicon boils emotion from human being. Go take a drug, the doctor says. Pain is a biochemical phenomenon. Erase all memory.
Antonella Gambotto-Burke, The Eclipse: A Memoir of Suicide
behavior, biochemical-phenomenon, cause-and-symptom, disinhibition, doctors, drugs, emotion, gps, human-being, illness, impulsive-aggression, major-depression, medical-lexicon, memory, pain, pharmaceutical-corporations, psychiatric-community, psychobiology, suffering