Currently, thousands of people in the Western world, and increasingly elsewhere, use antidepressants to alleviate their own anguish, sadness, or melancholy. The medicine used to lessen or cure the pains inherent in human existence has been as trivialized as the term "depression," used so broadly and carelessly that it acts as a barrier to exploring the details of our responses to grief and melancholy. In *Beyond Depression: New Ways of Understanding Grief and Melancholy*, Darian Leader, a psychoanalyst and founder of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research in London, explains that antidepressants increasingly function as a mirror for the illness, as the sufferer's inner life is no longer examined, prioritizing drug solutions. Following medication instructions becomes more important than examining the person's actual relationship with the pills. Thus, Leader argues, depression is conceived as a biological problem, like a bacterial infection, requiring a specific biological remedy. Sufferers need to return to their productive and happy states. Eliminating the problem has become more important than understanding it. Depression is considered the result of a lack of serotonin, rather than a response to experiences of loss and separation. Medications aim to restore sufferers to optimal levels of social integration and usefulness, without much concern for the long-term causes and potential effects of their psychological problems. Darian Leader, also author of "A Footnote to Freud" and "Why Do People Get Sick?", argues in this book for the need to abandon the current concept of depression: "Instead, we should see what we call depression as a set of symptoms that derive from complex and ever-changing human histories. These histories involve experiences of separation and loss, even if we are sometimes unaware of them. To understand how we respond to such experiences, we need the appropriate conceptual tools, and these, I believe, can be found in the old notions of mourning and melancholia." Through a reinterpretation of Freud's classic essay "Mourning and Melancholia," combined with rich examples from contemporary culture, Leader provokes an important reflection on the current trivialization of the term depression, used vaguely to describe a range of states. For the author, mourning and melancholy are more precise concepts that can help clarify how we deal with—or fail to deal with—losses, which are part of human life.
