Out of the Blue: Depression
and Human Nature
David B. Cohen
$25.00
0393036324
W.W. Norton
Non-Fiction/Health
"Popular theorizing about
mental illness is sometimes just highfalutin' storytelling. We explain
liability to depression or suicide by invoking deficiencies of mothering or
other aspects of rearing during early childhood. What kind of explanations are
these? How do we know if so-called causes are really causes or effects - or
something else? In fact, how do we know when such theorizing merely denies our
uncertainty and suspicion that we really don't know the answers that we feel we
ought to know? Perhaps much of our storytelling - what we like to think of as
scientific theorizing - merely defends against the intolerable idea that
depression, suicide, or other unfortunate developments often arise from chance
factors, in other words, bad luck including the largely unpredictable roll of
the genetic dice."
health
