In this work, Edward Shorter, a professor of psychiatry & the history of medicine argues for a return to the old fashioned concept of nervous illness. These are, he writes, diseases of the entire body, not the mind, & as was recognized as early as the 1600s. Shorter traces the evolution of the concept of 'nerves' & the 'nervous breakdown' in western medical thought. He points to a great paradigm shift in the first third of the 20th century that transferred behavioural disorders from neurology to psychiatry, spotlighting the mind, not the body. The catch-all term 'depression' now applies to virtually everything, 'a jumble of non-disease entities, created by political infighting within psychiatry, by competitive struggles in the pharmaceutical industry, and by the whimsy of the regulators.' Depression is a & very serious illness - it should not be diagnosed without regard to the rest of the body. |