The Right Rx for Sadness

. . . [T]here'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.