The increase of depression’s diagnoses nowadays is related to the expansion of the pharmaceutical industry market, and also to the trade of antidepressant drugs and to life’s medicalization phenomenon. The aim of this theoretical study is to analyze the factors that underlie what Philippe Pignarre called "epidemic of depression", a complex phenomenon that should not be reduced to biological or social factors, but it carries within it a booming drug economy. Some data will be collected on the strategies of the pharmaceutical industry to gain ground on expansion of diagnostics in order to raise their drugs on a level of products to be consumed, becoming one of the most profitable sectors of the world. Then, we question the status of psychoanalysis in a medicalized society, analyzing the critics that the theory has received in recent decades, especially in France, revealing the inability of the contemporary subject to express in words his suffering.
Medicalization; depression; psychoanalysis