About one American in five receives a diagnosis of major depression over the course of a lifetime. Thats despite the fact that many such patients have no mood disorder theyre not sad, but suffer from anxiety, fatigue, insomnia, or a tendency to obsess about the whole business. There is a term for what they have, writes Edward Shorter, and its a good old-fashioned term that has gone out of use. They have nerves.In How Everyone Became Depressed, Edward Shorter, a distinguished professor of psychiatry and 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, and as was recognized as early as the 1600s. Shorter traces the evolution of the concept of nerves and the nervous breakdown in western medical thought.
