Social pathology was once a mainstream concern of the social sciences, but

over the years it has become associated with conventional, ‘old-fashioned’, or

normatively conservative standpoints. For instance, the social science focus on
social pathologies of the early and mid-twentieth century was on specific topics,
such as alcoholism, crime and delinquency and (what was seen at that time as)
sexual deviance. More recently, professional clinicians and medical doctors have
provided a great number of books in a no more than ‘specialists without spirit, hedonists
without heart’ (ibid.).

Multidisciplinary in approach, the book addresses questions of how these

conditions are manifest at the level of individual bodies and minds, as well as
how the ‘bodies politic’ are related to the hegemony of reductive biomedical
and psychologistic perspectives. Rejecting such a reductive diagnosis, the
central research hypothesis uniting the book is that anxiety, depression and
Alzheimer’s disease, as well as other contemporary epidemics, are to be analysed
in the light of individual and collective experiences of profound and radical
changes in our civilization, of corresponding mutations of subjectivity and of
the social hegemonization of the biomedical and psychiatric perspective.
First, before we focus on the three above-mentioned concrete malaises, the
broader cultural context is explored by discussing the anthropological mutation
of the subject which has taken place in the transition from modern to postmodern
(or late modern) times. This mutation entails the emergence of an
isolist precarious subject faced with the task of creating a self, though deprived
of the conditions of possibility of successfully undertaking such a project under
conditions of the neoliberal revolution. The presentation of the essential
hypothesis of the mutation of subjectivity under conditions of neoliberalism by
one of the world’s foremost proponent of that diagnostic, Dany-Robert
Dufour, sets the scene for the analyses that follow, namely those of three major
‘epidemics’ of our time: anxiety, depression and Alzheimer’s disease. We choose
these three conditions because not only are they key disorders of our present
age, but also they correspond roughly with stages of the life course, anxiety
being the f astest-growing malaise among youth and adolescence; depression
being an affliction especially of young adulthood and mid-life; and Alzheimer’s
dementia as the coming ‘epidemic’ of an aging population.
Great is our God.