When we stop at the pharmacy to pick up our Prozac, are we simply
buying a drug? Or are we buying into a disease as well? The first
complete account of the phenomenon of antidepressants, this
authoritative, highly readable book relates how depression, a
disease only recently deemed too rare to merit study, has become
one of the most common disorders of our day--and a booming business
to boot.
"The Antidepressant Era" chronicles the history of
psychopharmacology from its inception with the discovery of
chlorpromazine in 1951 to current battles over whether these
powerful chemical compounds should replace psychotherapy. An expert
in both the history and the science of neurochemistry and
psychopharmacology, David Healy offers a close-up perspective on
early research and clinical trials, the stumbling and successes
that have made Prozac and Zoloft household names. The complex story
he tells, against a backdrop of changing ideas about medicine,
details the origins of the pharmaceutical industry, the pressures
for regulation of drug companies, and the emergence of the idea of
a depressive disease. This historical and neurochemical analysis
leads to a clear look at what antidepressants reveal about both the
workings of the brain and the sociology of drug marketing.
Most arresting is Healy's insight into the marketing of
antidepressants and the medicalization of the neuroses.
Demonstrating that pharmaceutical companies are as much in the
business of selling psychiatric diagnoses as of selling
psychotropic drugs, he raises disturbing questions about how much
of medical science is governed by financial interest.
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