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  3. Let’s say a patient walks into my office and says he’s been feeling down for the past three weeks. A month ago, his fiancee left

Let’s say a patient walks into my office and says he’s been feeling down for the past three weeks. A month ago, his fiancee left

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问题     Let’s say a patient walks into my office and says he’s been feeling down for the past three weeks. A month ago, his fiancee left him for another man, and he feels there’s no point in going on. He has not been sleeping well, his appetite is poor and he has lost interest in nearly all of his usual activities.
    Should I give him a diagnosis of clinical depression? Or is my patient merely experiencing what the 14th-century monk Thomas a Kempis called "the proper sorrows of the soul"? The answer is more complicated than some critics of psychiatric diagnosis think.     To these critics, psychiatry has medicalized normal sadness by failing to consider the social and emotional context in which people develop low mood for example, after losing a job or experiencing the breakup of an important relationship. This diagnostic failure, the argument goes, has created a bogus epidemic of increasing depression.
    In their recent book " The Loss of Sadness"(Oxford, 2007), Allan V. Horwitz and Jerome C. Wakefield assert that for thousands of years, symptoms of sadness that were "with cause" were separated from those that were "without cause". Only the latter were viewed as mental disorders.
    With the advent of modern diagnostic criteria, these authors argue, doctors were directed to ignore the context of the patient ’ s complaints and .focus only on symptoms—poor appetite, insomnia, low energy, hopelessness and so on. The current criteria for major depression, they say, largely fail to distinguish between "abnormal" reactions caused by "internal dysfunction" and "normal sadness" brought on by external circumstances. And they blame vested interests doctors, researchers, pharmaceutical companies for fostering this bloated concept of depression.
    Yes, most psychiatrists would concede that in the space of a brief "managed care" appointment, it’ s very hard to understand much about the context of the patient’s depressive complaints. And yes, under such conditions, some doctors are tempted to write that prescription for Prozac or Zoloft and move on to the next patient.
    But the vexing issue of when bereavement or sadness becomes a disorder, and how it should be treated, requires much more study. Most psychiatrists believe that undertreatment of severe depression is a more pressing problem than overtreatment of "normal sadness". Until solid research persuades me otherwise, I will most likely see people like my jilted patient as clinically depressed, not just "normally sad"—and I will provide him with whatever psychiatric treatment he needs to feel better.
By saying "a bogus epidemic", the author means ______.
选项 A、a universal phenomenon
B、a prevalent chronic disease
C、a false widespread outbreak
D、a rapid transmission of disease
答案C
解析 根据第三段上下文“精神病学把普通的忧郁医学化了，并没有考虑到人们心情低落的社会和感情背景”可知“epidemic of increasing depression”是不真实的。所以，C应为答案。
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