American Mania: When More is Not Enough

A doctor's bold analysis of the cultural disease that afflicts us all.

Despite an astonishing appetite for life, more and more Americans are feeling overworked and dissatisfied. In the world's most affluent nation, epidemic rates of stress, anxiety, depression, obesity, and time urgency are now grudgingly accepted as part of everyday existence they signal the American Dream gone awry.

Peter C. Whybrow, director of the Neuropsychiatric Institute at UCLA, grounds the extraordinary achievements ...