How Everyone Became Depressed: The Rise and Fall of the Nervous Breakdown

In How Everyone Became Depressed: The Rise and Fall of the Nervous Breakdown (2013), Edward Shorter, a professor of psychiatry and the history of medicine, argues for a return to the old-fashioned concept of nervous illness:

Take the women that you know. About half of them are depressed. Or at least that is the diagnosis that they got when they were put on antidepressants. ... They go to work but they are unhappy and uncomfortable; they are somewhat anxious; they are tired; they have various physical pains – and they tend to obsess about the whole business. There is a term for what they have, and it is a good old-fashioned term that has gone out of use. They have nerves or a nervous illness. It is an illness not just of mind or brain, but a disorder of the entire body. ... We have a package here of five symptoms–mild depression, some anxiety, fatigue, somatic pains, and obsessive thinking. ... We have had nervous illness for centuries. When you are too nervous to function ... it is a nervous breakdown. But that term has vanished from medicine, although not from the way we speak. ... The nervous patients of yesteryear are the depressives of today. That is the bad news. ... There is a deeper illness that drives depression and the symptoms of mood. We can call this deeper illness something else, or invent a neologism, but we need to get the discussion off depression and onto this deeper disorder in the brain and body. That is the point.
— Edward Shorter, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto.[9]

"In eliminating the nervous breakdown, psychiatry has come close to having its own nervous breakdown."
— David Healy, MD, FRCPsych, Professor of Psychiatry, University of Cardiff, Wales.[10]

"Nerves stand at the core of common mental illness, no matter how much we try to forget them."
— Peter J. Tyrer, FMedSci, Professor of Community Psychiatry, Imperial College, London.[11]

9. Edward Shorter (2013) How Everyone Became Depressed: The Rise and Fall of the Nervous Breakdown, Oxford University Press ISBN 978-0-19-994808-6
10. David Healy (2013) Pharmageddon, University of California Press ISBN 978-0520275768
11. Peter Tyrer (2013) Models for Mental Disorder, Wiley-Blackwell ISBN 978-1118540527

http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/depression/expert-answers/nervous-breakdown/faq-20057830