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🗓️ 31 May 2010
⏱️ 59 minutes
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0:00.0 | Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts |
0:13.9 | of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org |
0:21.2 | where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to |
0:26.5 | other information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mailadicontalk.org. We'd |
0:33.6 | love to hear from you. Today is May 26, 2010 and my guest is Lewis Manand, the NT and Robert |
0:44.8 | M. Bass professor of English at Harvard University. Mr. Benand, welcome to Econ Talk. |
0:49.7 | Thank you. Nice to be here. Our subject for today is an article you wrote for the New Yorker |
0:54.0 | on the State of Modern Psychiatry. The title of the article is Headcase and the subtitle was, |
1:00.6 | can psychiatry be a science? I spend a lot of time thinking about whether economics can be a science, |
1:05.9 | so the article resonated deeply with me. You looked at a couple of recent books on psychiatry, |
1:12.1 | one by Gary Greenberg, the other by Irving Kirsch. Both authors argue that psychiatry is in |
1:17.4 | disarray, but totally disagree with reasons for that. But I want to start with a basic question, |
1:24.1 | which is, do we know what depression is? Is it different as you raised the issue in the |
1:30.1 | beginning of your article? Is it different from being really sad in response to a life challenge? |
1:35.2 | Is there such a thing as clinical depression? Well, that's sort of the question at the center |
1:41.6 | of a lot of these debates about contemporary psychiatry and in particular about the use of the |
1:48.6 | diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, the DSM, which has been criticized |
1:54.0 | really ever since it was created back in 1952, but particularly in its most recent edition, |
1:58.6 | the fourth edition. And the problem is that it's impossible to distinguish empirically sadness |
2:08.4 | over some life event death or divorce or losing your job. And what you're calling clinical |
2:16.5 | depression, that is depression that doesn't seem to have an exogenous reason. And if you look |
2:24.6 | at the brains of people who have been laid off or have some other kind of life event that makes |
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