Ronald W. Dworkin

About the author: Ronald W. Dworkin is a practicing physician and an adjunct senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a public policy organization.

In the last thirty years, the number of patients diagnosed with depression has doubled. The sharp increase in these diagnoses is due to the fact that the medical community has blurred the distinction between everyday unhappiness and clinical depression. As a result, doctors are increasingly prescribing powerful psychotropic drugs such as Prozac to people who are suffering from the normal low spirits everyone is subject to from time to time. One reason that doctors aggressively prescribe drugs is the widely believed theory that both major mood disorders and mild unhappiness are determined by neurotransmitters in the brain. Although this theory has not been proved...