The cognitive/behaviorist roots that result in this biologistical concept of depression seem more functional for capitalist rationality, free-market positivism.

It also undermines any attempt to identify social pathologies that might be responsible for such phylogenetic developments, instead describing humans as "depressed by nature". I thought we had more reflected social epistemologies by now, but apparently the scientific enlightenment retains its ideological power...

Can you suggest any critical tools? Foucault? Freudomarxism?

Or maybe the reason why we humans have self-medicated ourselevs is that an understanding of life most often will reaveal life as a hopeless and negative situation.

Anxiety was the human sitaution in existentialism since we could grasp our own finitutes as a fact. No animals have this experience. Nor do they need any drugs. To say that drugs is a new way of coping, is something that I can not agree with. It is the human way of coping, and has been such for as long as history can remember - perhaps it will be A Brave New World in the future with drugs for everyone, all the time.

If it is true that thinking is to recognise hopelessness, then happiness is mental retardness. Understanding is pain.

Ofcourse you could also choose to believe that all is well, good and super-duper. But to achieve such a thing is very difficult, it recuires some sort of religion, such as shopping.

Shopping has replaced the sunday-in-church as an escape from the lived experience, and has become the sacral stupified idea that makes life bearable.

Mike,
I'm not sure. Psychoanalysis was the critical alternative to psychiatry as it was not involved in pharmaceutical treatment.

Deleuze and Guattari launch a critique of psychoanalysis, but I'm not sure where that leads in terms of treating everyday depression and mental illness.

Rolf,
you are right. Shopping has become a form of therapy. You work hard, earn lots of money, then spend up big on leisure and high tech goods because you deserve it.

But if people like Nietzsche are right about nihilism, then we are standing alone in a hollowed out culture where the meaning of social life has been drained away in a cosmopolitan global world.

It seems that people have lived the fast urban single life on or off various combinations and versions of anti-depressants and anti-anxiolitics.