'If you give it your little finger it will soon have your whole hand,' Sigmund Freud said of psychoanalysis in 1900. He had obviously seen the future. Britain in the twenty-first century means speaking freely and frankly about the state of our minds, about being depressed or being anxious or taking antidepressants. Our conversations are littered with psychobabble.

As sociology professor Frank Furedi says in his new book Therapy Culture, we live in a culture that takes emotions very seriously. We admit freely to breakdowns, depression, mania, anxiety, any number of mental illnesses - indeed in some circles it would be seen as very poor form not to do so.

A friend of mine recently met some friends from his university days. What did they talk about? Depression mostly. This caused much bonding and discussion; to belong nowadays, it helps to have 'been there'. And to have paid the price: Britons spent £38 million on self-help books in the past 12 months. Meanwhile, the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy has seen a 160 per cent increase in membership in 12 years and use of antidepressants has tripled in the past decade. Last week the Priory, 'the UK's leading independent provider of addiction treatment', sensing that the time was right, took the unprecedented step of advertising for clients in national newspapers. Fittingly, the Institute of Ideas is holding a one-day symposium next month that will explore, as they put it, 'the powerful influence of the therapeutic imperative in contemporary society.'

Dr Michael Fitzpatrick, a GP in north-east London for 20 years, says that many more patients now say they are depressed and anxious than would have done in the past. 'We all speak the language of self-esteem now. People talk in this sort of therapeutic discourse.' He thinks the confessional daytime programmes - from Oprah Winfrey to Jerry Springer - have popularised this way of understanding ourselves. But it's not only daytime TV that has picked up on our new-found fixation with mental health; broadsheet newspapers, smart magazines, prize-winning books and prime-time TV and radio are all now packed with stories of madness and misery.

A small selection from recent months: Nick Hornby talks openly about being in therapy on Desert Island Discs ; George Best hopes that Prozac will give him a new personality; Adam Ant admits to suffering from manic depression; the actress Emily Lloyd confesses to a decade-long battle with mental illness; Paul Gascoigne is diagnosed on C4 and found to be suffering from depression, attention deficit disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder. The BBC is working on a major series called Burnt Out Britain . Danuta Kean at The Bookseller confirms that 'there are an awful lot of books written about depression. Addiction is also amaz ingly popular. This is a huge market.' We also, she says, love big celebrity memoirs which detail this sort of struggle. Why does she think this stuff sells so well? 'Maybe it's baby boomers,' she suggests. 'Surely the most neurotic generation in history.'

So what does it all mean? Is all this frankness and attention to our interior lives a good thing? Certainly, increased awareness of mental illness, increased visibility, has meant less stigma and more treatment that is more accessible. The climate definitely isn't right for the Sun 's first headline about Frank Bruno being sectioned. 'Bonkers Bruno locked up' caused such a storm of protest that in later editions it was changed to 'Sad Bruno in mental home.' In his first book, Britain On The Couch , psychologist Oliver James argues convincingly that significantly more of us are genuinely suffering from depression, anxiety, neurosis, addiction. 'We are 45 times more violent than we were in 1950,' he says. 'And quite possibly 10 times more depressed.' So yes, increased frankness and awareness probably is a good thing.

But is there also a way in which we are overdoing all this? Are we creating a climate where we are prone to pathologise our every thought and in the process persuade some of the mentally healthy into unhealthy introspection? Where once people might have thought they were unhappy, nowadays they are more likely to worry that they are clinically depressed, or neurotic or manic, or suffering from any number of newer conditions, like shopping addiction or general anxiety disorder. Then it's off to a GP to be diagnosed and perhaps prescribed antidepressants like Prozac. 'Put the patient on vitamin P,' as one American doctor put it to me.

Tina Bartholomew, from Leeds, is 41 now and says she felt under pressure to take antidepressants when, five years ago, she went to see her doctor because she felt she needed some time off work.

'I'd never been to the doctor's about anything like this before. But I'd left my husband and was having trouble finding accommodation for myself and my teenage daughter. I had a very demanding job as a headteacher as well.' The final straw came when she had an accident in a restaurant - a light fitting fell off a wall and hit her on the shoulder. 'I got treatment but the pain kept me awake at night.'

In the end, lack of sleep combined with everything else started to get on top of her. She went to her GP because she wanted a few weeks off work. 'I just needed a bit of time, a bit of counselling maybe, somewhere to live really. My GP suggested an antidepressant. I didn't want to take tablets, but I didn't feel I had much choice. I needed the time off work which seemed to be dependent on my taking Prozac.'

A view from the other side of the desk: Dr Simon Atkins is a GP at the Fishponds Health Centre in Bristol who sees many more people for depression than he used to. He doesn't think all of them are depressed in the sense that they need to be treated. 'General unhappiness has now been turned in to an illness,' he says. 'People come to my surgery and say, "I'm very unhappy about so and so and I've heard that there are these pills I can take." Maybe they've been bereaved or something.'

Atkins says he often gives them a couple of weeks off work and then they feel better, but he also says that there is a temptation to follow through with what they're requesting and give them pills.

'Then you've got somebody on antidepressants unnecessarily and they have side effects. And they're committed to them for four to six months, which is the recommended time and really they were a bit miserable because their wife had walked out on them or they'd lost their job or something. I think it is harmful to medicate yourself through something which is as natural as the grieving process.'

After several days on Prozac, Tina says she became very depressed. 'I started shaking. I couldn't stop crying - I'd go to bed crying and wake up in the morning crying.' When it became too much she telephoned her doctor. A different GP told her that she should have been warned that sometimes antidepressants make you feel worse before you feel better. 'So I stuck with them but I was still crying six or seven weeks later, so I went back and said, "look, Prozac obviously isn't for me."' The locum she saw agreed, but put her on another antidepressant called Cipramil. At that stage, Tina says, she just wanted to feel better so she took them. 'At first I did feel a bit better but then I started having panic attacks. I'd never had a panic attack before. I started being really scared of enclosed spaces. I had to force myself to go out of the house.'

She considers herself fortunate in that having a daughter to look after forced her to leave the house every day. 'But the panic attacks continued so I went back to my doctor and we agreed that I should stop taking the tablets. We reduced the dosage slowly.'

Marjorie Wallace is the chief executive and founder of mental health charity Sane. She has worked as a campaigner in mental health for more than 17 years and when we talked about the possibility of unhealthy preoccupation with mental illness she referred me, not surprisingly, to 'the thousands of people battling against crippling feelings, struggling to get help'.

She concedes, however, that there may be a sense in which we have stopped allowing people properly to experience the human condition. 'Part of which probably is deep melancholy. There are profound emotions that we can't eradicate as long as we have death and suffering and disappointment that are now included in the umbrella description of depression and therefore seen as suitable for treatment.' She sees this primarily as a labelling or language issue. You say 'down'. I say 'depression'.

As American psychologist Richard Gist puts it: 'There is a societal trend towards treating angst as if it were anxiety, disequilibrium as depression, discomfort as if it were distress and all pain as if it were pathognomonic.'

This is in part because there has been a fundamental shift in our expectations. We now believe we have a basic right to, as the line about Prozac went, 'feel better than good'. We talk a lot about 'quality of life' and about 'well-being' - the buzz word of the decade writ large across health pages everywhere. 'The very meaning of wellness has been changing,' notes a recent Henley Centre report. 'No longer is it just being free from disease; instead there has been a shift in focus on "health" through "fitness" to "well-being". One should be well in every sense; physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. Well-being suggests quality of life, self-fulfilment, serenity, development. As we move into a post-materialist society such well-being is becoming increasingly important to us.'

During his career, Gist, a public health psychologist with the Kansas City Fire Department, has been on hand to help with disasters like the collapse of the Hyatt Regency skywalks in Kansas in 1981 and a United Airlines crash in Iowa in 1989. He feels strongly that our shift in focus is both damaging and ultimately undermining.

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.'

Gist rails against what he sees as our obsession with the need for therapeutic or medical intervention in even the most extreme of situations. 'I'm just drafting a paper with a British colleague in which we suggest that most interventions that people respond to positively are likely to be the non-specific impacts of presence, concern, compassion and simple instrumental assistance - the kind of stuff you learn from grandma, not grad school.'

In other words the kind of support you can get from family and friends. 'There is a lot you can do that is helpful, supportive, valuable and even vital,' he says, 'but you do not have to masquerade as indispensable saviours heading people off from inevitable disaster.' The influence of Freud on society, Gist says, has meant that our discomforts in life are seen to require external professional intervention to resolve them. They are not just simply aspects of living. 'We treat them as if they are injuries or illnesses.'

In Therapy Culture, Furedi argues that therapeutic culture now incites people to feel vulnerable and ill. Certainly Patricia Turner feels that being referred to a therapist made her feel worse instead of better.

Twenty eight now, she went to see her GP last year with, as she puts it, 'loads of non-specific problems - I wasn't sleeping well, I was tense, I'd lost my appetite and was feeling a bit weepy. Looking back, I think it was fall-out from my mother being ill. About six months before she'd been quite seriously ill and I'd found it a bit destabilising for a while.' Her GP thought she was suffering from depression and should see a counsellor.

'I was taken aback at first, quite surprised, I had mixed feelings about being described as "depressed" because I wasn't how I imagined depressed people to be, but in a way it was a relief to be offered treatment.' She began seeing a therapist in north London. 'During the first session she asked me a lot of questions about what was wrong and then explained to me how she worked. The first thing that put me off was when I realised that the amount of time I was to spend with her was open ended.

I think I thought that if you're seriously mentally ill you might need to spend your life in therapy, but I just felt I needed a short course of support essentially. Still, I decided to give it a go.'

After a couple of sessions Turner says she began to realise that, as far as her therapist was concerned, anything and everything could be positioned as a problem. 'She seemed to pathologise everything I said. To find something negative about it. She asked me what I thought I was good at, for example, and when I said truthfully, "Shopping for clothes," she thought that was a problem. She thought that it might be a distraction from deeper problems.

'Actually, although I can smile about it now, I felt destroyed by some of our sessions. I remember having a latte in a cafe after one of them and thinking, "God, now I'm really depressed." I lasted about six sessions in the end; I didn't find seeing her productive. I felt she very much focused on the negative and she became a sort of problem-eating beast that always needed feeding.

'She ended up making me feel worse about everything and even though your rational mind knows that there's not much really wrong with you, I did feel that I came away with more problems than when I started.'

GP and author of Health Tyranny (Routledge) Mike Fitzpatrick thinks that treatment is increasingly becoming a way of life. That there's a basic feeling now woven into our culture that we all need intervention in order to survive.

'A sort of constant rehab scheme. It's the logical conclusion of exaggerating individual frailty. I think that we've now got a society that is the opposite of rugged entrepreneurs and pioneering spirit.'

Our mistake, perhaps, is that because we now focus on frailty and failure we therefore, as Richard Gist puts it: 'Miss out entirely on all the information that might be gleaned from the vast majority of people who are just surviving. We haven't gone in search of those who persevere to discover how they manage.'

There's a thought.

Some names have been changed

· Therapy Culture is published by Routledge