Second Opinion: A Doctor’s Dispatches from a British Inner City

p. 106

“It has been shown conclusively that people who listen to the news or read a newspaper at breakfast are more miserable than those who wisely maintain themselves in ignorance.  Unfortunately, help for the former is not at hand: one of the main stories in in the newspapers recently was that antidepressants do not work for the vast majority of people.  Of course, I always knew this: misery is the natural and inescapable condition of man.  That is why the American psychiatrist Thomas Szasz once wrote a paper proposing that happiness be classified as a disease.  Not only is it statistically aberrant, but it also leads to disastrous consequences (proposals of marriage, for example) and is grossly inappropriate to man’s true situation”.