Alain Ehrenberg is a sociologist, the director of CESAMES (Research Center on Mental Health, Psychotropics and Society, Paris Descartes University), senior researcher at CNRS, and the author of several books on contemporary individualism.

Drawing on the accumulated knowledge of a lifetime devoted to the study of the individual in modern democratic society, Ehrenberg shows that the phenomenon of modern depression is not a construction of the pharmaceutical industry but a pathology arising from inadequacy in a social context where success is attributed to, and expected of, the autonomous individual. In so doing, he provides both a novel and convincing description of the illness that clarifies the intertwining relationship between its diagnostic history and changes in social norms and values.