Psychiatry constructs depression within the supposedly meaning-free paradigm of 'objective knowledge'. Depression is therefore said to be a wholly valueless experience, a 'disease'. This is part of a wider prejudice lying deep in the roots of the new global 'technoculture', a prejudice that sees all painful or undesired experience, even including death, as unnecessary evils which we will (hopefully) eventually eliminate by continually improving our understanding of ourselves and the universe we live in. Civilization - as a rational utopia - is thus identified with the power to have everything the way we want it. This is what Illich meant when he spoke of the 'anaesthetic society' - a society that uses pharmaceutical technology to blank out experiences that it does not value.

The model of depression that is outlined in the following article is constructed within the paradigm of Self-Organization, and is therefore a theory based on the new sciences of complexity.