"I am leaving the initial post above as a record of this odd incident."

Good idea.

The (Australian) ABC's Media Watch program ripped into the print media's interpretations of Spitzer's comments last night. A transcript, together with graphics and video link, can be found here.

Wikipedia's summary of the relevant part of the episode in question, which screened on 18 March, is as follows:

"The second episode reiterated many of the ideas of the first, but developed the theme that the drugs such as Prozac and lists of psychological symptoms which might indicate anxiety or depression were being used to normalise behaviour and make humans behave more predictably, like machines.

"This was not presented as a conspiracy theory, but as a logical (although unpredicted) outcome of market-driven self-diagnosis by checklist, discussed in the previous programme.

"People with standard mood fluctuations self-diagnosed as abnormal; they then presented at psychiatrist's offices and fulfilled diagnostic criteria without explaining personal histories and so were medicated. The alleged result was that vast numbers of Western people have had their behaviour and mentation modified by SSRI drugs without any strict medical necessity.