The word “unhappy” has almost been banished from our
vocabulary. It has been replaced by the word “depressed.”
For every patient who confesses to unhappiness, a thousand
now claim to be depressed. What was once considered to be an
inescapable part of the human condition has been elevated
(or is it reduced?), by a semantic change, to an illness. And
since good health care is now regarded as a right, the
corollary of unhappiness being an illness is that people
believe themselves to be entitled not merely to the pursuit
of happiness, but to the thing itself.
A right being unconditional (or else it would not be a
right), the pursuit of happiness must therefore always end
in success, rather as the bear-hunting of such leaders as
Brezhnev and Ceausescu had always to end in ursine
slaughter, thanks to the minions who drove tranquilized
bears to be mown down at point-blank range by the leaders.
The pride of Brezhnev and Ceausescu in their hunting prowess
was ersatz, of course, and the author of this book contends
that much of our contemporary happiness is likewise ersatz.
It is Dr. Dworkin’s argument that doctors have been
complicit, or at least instrumental, in bringing about this
widespread state of ersatz happiness. His analysis does not
always make it clear whether he believes that doctors have
been the conscious originators of, or mere blind
participants in, this development, which he says is pregnant
with problems for society. He foresees a time