This book tells nothing less than the story of the slow and steady process of turning soul into substance, substance into chemicals, chemicals into targets of other chemicals. It's also a story about materialism as both hope and bane -- holding out the prospect of triumph over suffering, but only in return for the disenchantment of the universe and the trivializing of the human spirit."

This wide ranging book will also distinguish itself from the raft of depression literature -- the prescriptive and the polemical, the technical and the simplistically self-helpful -- by identifying and questioning the "ambition and greed that lie beneath the manufacture of depression, and reveal how entrepreneurs of the psyche -- doctors and drug companies alike -- have used science to profit from human unhappiness so successfully that they have changed the way we think about not only depression, but ourselves as well."

Arguing neither for nor against medical drug use, Gary, a practising psychotherapist for over twenty years, will provide a way for us to re-examine fundamental questions about the flaws in our natures and the limiting, perspective-and-mind-altering ways we’ve devised to undo the intrusive, sometimes daunting effects of the intractable forms of unhappiness with which many of us are forced to deal (more than 31 million anti-depressant prescriptions and counting in the UK last year). This recent headlines about those newly-published figures make this a piece as timely as it is important. This book aims to take the conversation in a vital new direction by charting the transformation of "Melancholy" into our present-day conception of the disease "Depression" over the last 2,500 years.