The Right Rx for Sadness

In the 19th-century novel Hyperion, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow admonished his hero, unlucky in love, to "take this sorrow to thy heart, and make it a part of thee, and it shall nourish thee till thou art strong again." Had Paul Flemming been real and alive today, chances are he would have taken Prozac or Paxil instead. Last month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that antidepressants are the country's most commonly prescribed medication, accounting for 118 million prescriptions in 2005. A sign, some experts are wondering, that it's time to reassess?

Although many psychiatrists worry more about desperate souls not getting help, there's a growing concern that medicine often goes to people who shouldn't be taking it. And a consensus has formed that the estimate of how many people will develop depression at some point—1 in 6—might be greatly inflated. "There's no question that the availability of these drugs has increased the diagnosis of depression," says Jerome Wakefield, a professor of social work at New York University. Wakefield is coauthor of the new book The Loss of Sadness, which argues that selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors—Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft—are commonly overused to treat sadness, a normal and healthy response to divorce, sudden unemployment, the end of a friendship, a house foreclosure.

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