Our Culture, What’s Left Of It

FrontPageMagazine.com | Wednesday, August 31, 2005 ^

[Track9]

Our Culture, What’s Left Of It By: Jamie Glazov

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Dr. Theodore Dalrymple, a contributing editor to City Journal and the author of his new collection of essays Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses.

FP: Dr. Theodore Dalrymple, welcome to Frontpage Magazine. It is a pleasure to have you with us.

I guess we can begin with your observations on the root causes of many of our social ills. You discuss how in your practise as a doctor you have confronted a growing pathology in our culture within which there is an assumption that “one’s state of mind, or one’s mood, is or should be independent of the way one lives one’s life.” You connect this to people confusing unhappiness with depression. Can you talk a bit about this?

Dalrymple: I have noticed the disappearance of the word 'unhappy' from common usage, and its replacement by the word 'depressed.' While unhappiness is a state of mind that is clearly the result of the circumstances of one's life, whether self-inflicted or inflicted by circumstances beyond one's control, or a mixture of both, depression is an illness that is the doctor's responsibility to cure. This is so, however one happens to be leading one's life. And the doctor, enjoined to pass no judgement that could be interpreted as moral on his patients, has no option but to play along with this deception. The result is the gross over-prescription of medication, without any reduction in unhappiness.

As you put it, there is a complete disconnection between one's state of mind and the way one lives. Moreover, one does not have a right to the pursuit of happiness, one has a right to happiness itself.

[Tax-chick]

This needs to have the correct date posted:

Wednesday, August 31, 2005

[Tax-chick]

Oh, never mind, it was. I’m a ditz sometimes.

[Ozone34]

Great book! Depressing, yes, but great.