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Thanks to all contributors for their insights. There is of course another side to the story and the comments by WayneL  reminded me of another possible villain.

This is from a review I read recently of three books:

The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder

by Allan V. Horwitz and Jerome C. Wakefield

Oxford University Press, 287 pp., $29.95

Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness

by Christopher Lane

Yale University Press, 263 pp., $27.50

Let Them Eat Prozac: The Unhealthy Relationship Between the Pharmaceutical Industry and Depression

by David Healy

New York University Press, 351 pp., $18.95 (paper)

The reviewer (Frederick Crews in the New York Review of Books, Volume 54, Number 19, December 6, 2007) said:

“…we hear, for example, that an unprecedented epidemic of depression and anxiety has recently been sweeping the world, we tend not to ask ourselves whose interest is served by that impression. In their painstaking study The Loss of Sadness, Allan V. Horwitz and Jerome C. Wakefield cite the World Health Organization's projection:

that by 2020 depression will become the second leading cause of worldwide disability, behind only heart disease, and that depression is already the single leading cause of disability for people in midlife and for women of all ages.

The WHO also ranks depression, in its degree of severity for individual victims, ahead of "Down syndrome, deafness, below-the-knee amputation, and angina." But Horwitz and Wakefield cogently argue that those judgments rest on a failure to distinguish properly between major depression, which is indeed devastating for its sufferers, and lesser episodes of sadness. If so, the WHO would appear to have bought Big Pharma's [major pharmaceutical companies] line of goods.

This isn't to say that people who experience infrequent minor depression without long-term dysfunction aren't sick enough to deserve treatment. Of course they are. But as all three of the books under consideration here attest, the pharmaceutical companies haven't so much answered a need as turbocharged it. And because self-reporting is the only means by which nonpsychotic mental ailments come to notice, a wave of induced panic may wildly inflate the epidemiological numbers, which will then drive the funding of public health campaigns to combat the chosen affliction.”

Regards, Pronto