This article examines the historiography of depression, with an eye to illuminating wider issues in the social study of psychiatry and depression. It argues that the advent of Prozac caused notable shifts in how scholars in the looked at depression. Far from solidifying the medical status of depression and psychiatry’s treatment of it, the spread of pill-oriented depression treatment strengthened social researchers’ emphasis on psychiatry’s social nature. The article further argues that a depiction of psychiatry as mainly a social phenomenon both unduly diminishes its status as medicine, and implicitly underestimates the social in the rest of medicine. This matters if people can benefit from psychiatric treatment. Put another way, if people taking psychiatric medications are indeed ill, and taking medicines that can help them, social analysis should acknowledge this, even as it rightly investigates psychiatry as embedded in social and cultural contexts, as all of medicine is. Doing so means treating psychiatry, whatever its limitations, as a kind of medicine, not as a special case.

本文考察了抑郁症的史学，着眼于阐明精神病学和抑郁症社会研究中更广泛的问题。它认为，百忧解的出现导致了学者们看待抑郁症的方式发生了显着变化。以药丸为导向的抑郁症治疗的传播并没有巩固抑郁症的医学地位和精神病学的治疗方法，而是加强了社会研究人员对精神病学社会性的重视。文章进一步认为，将精神病学主要描述为一种社会现象，既不恰当地降低了其作为医学的地位，又暗中低估了其他医学领域的社会性。如果人们可以从精神病治疗中受益，这很重要。换句话说，如果服用精神药物的人确实生病了，并且服用了可以帮助他们的药物，社会分析应该承认这一点，即使它正确地调查了嵌入在社会和文化背景中的精神病学，就像所有医学一样。这样做意味着将精神病学视为一种药物，而不是一种特殊情况，无论其有什么局限性。