Product Description

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? An account of the phenomenon of antidepressants, this 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. This book 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #192341 in Books
• Published on: 1999-10-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Customer Reviews

ANTI-DEPRESSANT ERROR
The theme of this book is that the modern era in Psychiatry, and specifically in Psychopharmacology, the 'Anti-Depressant Era,' has brought with with it not just a raft of new drugs - anti-depressant, anti-psychotic, anxiolytic etc - but also a raft of new industrial practices also.

Key to understanding this book is the line 'Is the standardisation that is appearing in Psychiatry the result of scientific progress or a consequence of an industrial progress?' It is a very good question, one that Healy leaves the reader to answer for his or herself.

In a similiar fashion to the way some complain about the 'military-industrial complex,' the proposition that the growth of the military in America and the massive amounts of money pumped into it necessitates the need for war likewise does Healy seem to be proposing that the growth of the Pharmaceutical industry and the massive growth in their profits necessitates the need for new 'illness's.' The best example of same being at the start of the era when, in order to to market Amitriptryline, Merck marketed the concept of depression by buying and distributing copies of Frank Ayd's 'Recognising the Depressed Patient,' which concentrated on recognizing and treating depression in general medical settings.

The ever-increasing 'specificity' (its ability to work on specific chemicals in the brain) of the new drugs being brought into the marketplace, is questioned likewise the expansion in the number of categories of mental illness to match the ever increasing specificity of the new therapeutic compounds.

David Healy is by far and away the best historian of Psychopharmacology and because, in the modern era, the history of Psychopharmacology IS the history of Psychiatry, he is the best historian of Psychiatry in the modern era too. Anyone interested in Psychiatry should read this and then read all his other books.

nobody's happy nowadays
Another interesting book by Mr Healy about psychiatric medication and its history. Seems he is a bit of a lone voice in questioning the pharmacy business.