One of the recent challenges in mental health has been the medicalization of wider swaths of everyday life. Clinicians are increasingly treating problems in living as if they were biological in origin and reflective of pathology rather than typical and expectable reactions to life events. This has led to a conflation of difficulties and setbacks with severe depression, exaggerating the former and minimizing the latter in popular conception. Here Harrington explores how this evolution has taken place in the last 40 years.