Abstract
This collective volume takes a fresh look at the psychiatric diagnosis of “major depressive disorder”, the disorder’s nature and its social meaning today. The heterogeneity of the conditions we call “depression” is so great that it raises difficult questions of individuation and identity. Major depression is one category of disorder in the DSM-5 and ICD-10, yet it is virtually universally agreed that the conditions that fall under that category constitute several different disorders caused by quite different etiologies. Similarly, depression varies across cultures in the way it presents, the way it is experienced, and the way it is valued or disvalued, so if it is so different, what makes it the same condition of “depression” that is being studied across cultures? Depression is the category of mental disorder most clearly recognized continuously since antiquity, yet it is also a category that has transformed and dramatically expanded during the twentieth century, so what makes it the same category over time? This is both a major intellectual challenge and a more immediate editorial challenge of explaining how the many diverse contributions to this volume could possibly be talking about a common topic. In attempting to provide an encompassing perspective, we acknowledge that some of the contributors to this volume may well disagree (and that at times we two disagree), and put forward the following thoughts in the spirit of offering one possible perspective among many.
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Acknowledgment
This volume grew out of a conference held in Paris in June 2010 on the occasion of the publication of the French translation of Horwitz and Wakefield ’s book, Loss of Sadness, titled “Tristesse ou depression ?” [Sadness or Depression?]. This international conference, organized by Françoise Parot and Steeves Demazeux, was financed by the project PHS2M (‘Philosophie, Histoire et Sociologie de la Médecine mentale’) and supported by the Agence Nationale pour la Recherche (ANR-08-BLAN-0055-01). We want to express our deep gratitude to the director of the PHS2M, Pierre-Henri Castel, to Françoise Parot – who translated the Loss of Sadness into French, and who led this collective project – and to all the participants in this initial event: Derek Bolton, Xavier Briffault, Pierre-Henri Castel, Françoise Champion, Christopher Dowrick, Alain Ehrenberg, Luc Faucher, Denis Forest, Bernard Granger, David Healy and Fernando Vidal. We are grateful to David Goldberg, Allan Horwitz, Junko Kitanaka, Maël Lemoine and Mario Maj who later accepted invitations to join the project. Finally, we would like to thank co-editor Philippe Huneman and Springer’s Ties Nijssen for their complete support and confidence in this project throughout this long publication process.
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Wakefield, J.C., Demazeux, S. (2016). Introduction: Depression, One and Many. In: Wakefield, J., Demazeux, S. (eds) Sadness or Depression?. History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences, vol 15. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-7423-9_1
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