In my books, I address social issues. LISTENING TO PROZAC was not about the pros and cons of taking antidepressants; it was about what our culture demands of us in terms of energy and assertiveness – about how we construe happiness. So was SHOULD YOU LEAVE? In it, I asked what we expect of intimate relationships, here and now: and I explored the effect on marriages of a prevailing American attitude that favors autonomy over community and achievement over attachment. Though it reviews the science of mood disorder, my new book, AGAINST DEPRESSION, considers cultural issues as well. Research evidence suggests depression is a disease in the most ordinary sense, just as cancer or diabetes is a disease. That new reality may lead us to conclude that mood disorder is no more a sign of emotional refinement than is tuberculosis – another condition that carried its quota of romance, until science caught up with it. Widespread, mysterious, and hard to treat, depression has over centuries given rise to important cultural beliefs – in particular, the myth of heroic melancholy. To embrace the medical understanding of depression would be to live differently, to adopt new tastes and values – perhaps to mistrust the notion that gloominess and social alienation are signs of emotional or intellectual profundity. But if my books are speculative, still I operate daily in the world of practical choices regarding mental illness. I spend my afternoons practicing psychiatry – working with people in pain, confronting challenges that call for active responses. I thought that, in this essay, I might take the opportunity to address directly and in brief an issue I approach in less compact fashion in my book: what constitutes help for depression? For if you say, as I do, that depression is a recurrent, progressive, often deadly illness, you should be willing to answer the question that follows: if a person has depression, what should he or she do about it?