Manufacturing Depression, Gary Greenberg
Manufacturing Depression, Gary Greenberg
List: $21.99 | Sale: $15.39
Club: $10.99

Manufacturing Depression
The Secret History of a Modern Disease

Author: Gary Greenberg

Narrator: Kirby Heyborne

Unabridged: 14 hr 10 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 02/05/2010


Synopsis

"Am I happy enough?" This has been a pivotal question since America's inception. "Am I not happy enough because I am depressed?" is a more recent version. Psychotherapist Gary Greenberg shows how depression has been manufactured—not as an illness but as an idea about our suffering, its source, and its relief. He challenges us to look at depression in a new way.

In the twenty years since their introduction, antidepressants have become staples of our medicine chests. Upwards of 30 million Americans are taking them at an annual cost of more than $10 billion. Even more important, Greenberg argues, it has become common, if not mandatory, to think of our unhappiness as a disease that can—and should—be treated by medication. Manufacturing Depression tells the story of how we got to this peculiar point in our history.

About Gary Greenberg

Gary Greenberg is a practicing psychotherapist in Connecticut and the author of The Noble Lie. He has written about the intersection of science, politics, and ethics for many publications, including Harper's, the New Yorker, Wired, Discover, Rolling Stone, and Mother Jones, where he's a contributing writer.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Gina on July 24, 2010

Oh man, as a lover of totally depresso shit and the history of science, this book was GREAT. Basically, psychiatrist Greenberg -- who has spent a lifetime battling various degrees of clinical depression himself -- outlines how it came to be that, like, our entire country is on-the-books depressed. H......more

Goodreads review by Lark on January 30, 2019

Glib and messy. It was hard to untangle Greenberg's facts from his theories from his polemical rants--it was all presented in a mosh of sentences, and I ended up not trusting the author, and not liking him too much either. I continue to be fascinated by the difficulty the psychotherapy profession ha......more

Goodreads review by Emily Kestrel on February 13, 2016

I'll start this review with a confession: like the author and millions of other folk, I am prone to depression (along with the occasional bouts of anxiety and insomnia and the attention span of a gnat), but luckily I consider myself more of an old-fashioned garden variety neurotic than someone who i......more

Goodreads review by Sharon on March 14, 2010

Psychotherapist Gary Greenberg presents a fascinating and in-depth look at the history of depression in the United States, and the role that pharmaceutical companies play in the recent rise in diagnosis. As someone who has been in and out of treatment for depression for 15 years, on a range of medica......more

Goodreads review by Glenn on March 27, 2014

This book gets off to a good start. The writer explains technical information, from biochemistry to psychology, very clearly, even entertainingly. He uses on-the-scene images and cases to make it all real. I like the way he relates this anti-pharma position to his personal and professional lives. So......more