PETER D. KRAMER, author of the phenomenally successful ''Listening to Prozac,'' may be thought of as America's Dr. Depression, and he may have done more than anybody else to illuminate the clawing, scabrous, catastrophic monotony that is depressive illness.

But he has never suffered from the mental disorder himself. Not that he's a chipper bon vivant.

''I am easily upset,'' he writes in [his book] ''Against Depression.'' ''I brood over failures. I require solitude... In medieval or Renaissance terms, I am melancholic as regards my preponderant humor.''

Still, he has never qualified for a diagnosis of even low-level depression. My first reaction to that biographical detail was to question Kramer's authority on the subject.

How can you really understand what pain is, I wondered, if you've never felt the Cuisinart inside?

I quickly dropped my objections, however, when I realized I was doing for depression precisely what Kramer warns against in this eloquent, absorbing and largely persuasive book.

I was lifting it to the status of the metaphysical, or at least the meta-medical. I was granting to its specific pain the presumed reimbursement of revelation, the power to ennoble, instruct and certify the sufferer.

By contrast, I'd never insist that my endocrinologist suffer my autoimmune disorder before treating me or talking publicly about autoimmunity; or that my endodontist, before extracting my infected dental pulp, first be ''enlightened'' with a few root canals of his own.

That Kramer has not been depressed may in fact allow him to resist doing what depressives, and those who love them, too readily do, which is romanticize and totemize and finally trivialize the illness.

Instead, Kramer, who is a clinical professor of psychiatry at Brown University, sees depression for what it is.

''It is fragility, brittleness, lack of resilience, a failure to heal,'' he writes. It is sadness, hopelessness, chronic exhaustion allied with corrosive anxiety, a loss of any emotion but guilt, of any desire but to stop, please stop, and to stay stopped, forever.

''Depression is a disease of extraordinary magnitude,'' he says, and ''the major scourge of humankind.''

Found by the World Health Organization to be the single most disabling disease, depression afflicts people of every age, class, race, creed and calling: as many as 25 percent of us will be caught in its vise at least once in our lives.

The disease blights careers, shatters families and costs billions of dollars in lost workdays a year. Kramer cites studies putting the annual workplace cost in this country alone at $40 billion -- the+equivalent of 3 percent of the gross national product.

Depression also kills, through suicide, heart disease, pneumonia, accidents. Forget the persistent myth of depression as a source of artistry, soulfulness and rebellion. Depression doesn't fan creative flames. It is photophobic and anhedonic and would rather just drool in the dark.

Kramer wrote ''Against Depression'' to dispel what he sees as the lingering charisma of the disease.

And yes, people talk about it now as a biological disease rather than a moral or spiritual failing. The stigma of mental illness has mainly faded, and antidepressants are among the most widely prescribed of all medications.

Nevertheless, in the dozen years since the publication of ''Listening to Prozac,'' Kramer has seen plenty of resistance to the idea that depression, like cancer, AIDS or malaria, is a disease without redeeming value, best annihilated entirely.

He has read stacks of depression memoirs, and though most have parroted the party line that depression is a disease like any other, ''hints of pride almost invariably showed through, as if affliction with depression might after all be more enriching than, say . . . kidney failure.''

The writers couldn't help conveying the message: ''Depression gave me my soul.''

Moreover, whenever Kramer gives a talk, sooner or later an audience member invariably asks The Question. So, Dr. Kramer, what would have happened if van Gogh had taken Prozac? Or Kierkegaard? Or Virginia Woolf?

The implication of the question is obvious. Throw out the depression bath water and, whoops, there go ''Starry Night'' and ''Mrs. Dalloway'' with it.

Kramer presents a sustained case that depression, far from enhancing cognitive or emotional powers, essentially pokes holes in the brain, killing neurons and causing key regions of the prefrontal cortex -- the advanced part of the brain, located just behind the forehead -- to shrink measurably in size.

He lucidly explains a wealth of recent research on the disease, citing work in genetics, biochemistry, brain imaging, the biology of stress, studies of identical twins.

He compares the brain damage from depression with that caused by strokes. As a result of diminished blood flow to the brain, he says, many elderly stroke patients suffer crippling depressions.

Is stroke-induced depression a form of ''heroic melancholy''? If not, then why pin merit badges on any expression of the disease?

Rallying his extensive familiarity with art and literature, Kramer argues that history's depressive luminaries were creative not because of but despite their struggles with mental illness -- as a result of their underlying resilience, a quality he admires.

Kramer envisions a utopian future in which neuro-resilience and neuro-regeneration may be easily induced with drugs or gene therapy.

How much more intellectually and emotionally courageous might we be, he asks, how much more readily might we venture out on limbs and high wires, if we knew a private trampoline would always break our fall?

KRAMER'S narrative is not seamless. He argues that depression has long been very much among us, and he rightly discounts pat evolutionary hypotheses about the disease's ''adaptive value,'' but he doesn't offer much of an explanation himself for how a condition so devastating has come to be so common.

Kramer can also sound defensive and willfully dour. To counter possible charges of superficiality or a fondness for smiley-face fixes, he presents his ''bona fides as a person who can appreciate alienation, both the social and existential varieties,'' among them being a New York-born German Jew who lost many relatives in the Holocaust.

He rejects our habitual conflation of tragedy with depth and joy with shallowness, yet when A. L. Kennedy, author of the memoir ''On Bullfighting,'' struggles to find some lightness by recalling how her suicidal fantasies clashed with her fear of public embarrassment, Kramer dismisses her attempts as an author's version of ''meeting cute.''

Ah, but self-mockery can be a small source of joy, even redemption, which is why, whenever I lapse into hand-wringing, I recall Ezra Pound's ode to misery, a parody of A. E. Housman:

Now that's what I call cute.

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Natalie Angier, who contributes science articles to The Times, is completing a book about the scientific canon.

Source: The New York Times May 22, 2005

Book: Against Depression, by Peter D. Kramer.

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