… being sad? “From Adam Ant to Nick Hornby, everyone seems to be opening up about depression. But is the therapy culture actually making us ill? ” A thoughtful essay drawing on a number of critics of ‘therapy culture’, ‘treating angst as if it were anxiety’, and the expectation that we have a right to feel ‘better than good’.

We have gone from being a society that expects life to be a set of struggles and challenges to which we must respond and over which we have a personal sort of challenge to achieve some good, and evolved in to a world where we are born with an entitlement to an unfettered, uncomplicated life, free of angst and anxiety.’ There is, he says, an expectation now ‘that we ought to be able to fix everything’. Gist is particularly well-placed to know how impossible that expectation is to meet. ‘If there’s one thing that the incredible calamities in my work have taught me,’ he says, ‘it’s that we have to start out with a simple understanding in life – not everything can be fixed.’ —Guardian.UK