Listening to Prozac

by Peter D. Kramer (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  1993

  $6.80

• Used

  Paperback
  1994

  $7.05

  The author, a psychiatrist, looks at anti-depressant drugs. Prescribing them to patients for 15 years, and believing in their usefulness, he looks at the simple cases of drug use, as well as using his experience with private patients and his broad reading of literature to address the nature of the self. Sometimes anti-depressants alter what the patient considers his character, not his illness, sometimes drugs improve performance in social and work life - memory, articulation, dexterity - and this introduces the possibility of taking anti-depressants the way you would get a nose job. Will these drugs be abused? More importantly, do they obstruct the dialogue between the psychiatrist and his patient, between the patient and his or herself by obscuring the origins and individual manifestations of illness?

• Used

  Hardcover
  1994

  $4.87

  Introduced into Britain in 1989 and already prescribed to over half a million people, Prozac is said to transform pessimists into optimists, turn loners into extroverts, give the timid confidence - in short, to be able to alter the very core of human personality. Nicknamed bottled sunshine and the feminist pep pill , Prozac is fast becoming a cult drug, almost a status symbol. But should we resist the lure of a happiness pill that may actually change character and temperament? For if personality can be shaped by chemicals then some very serious questions must be asked about the nature of the self. This book takes the experiences of Dr Peter Kramer's patients on Prozac as the jumping-off point for an exploration of the most up-to-date ideas about what we think of as the mind and its intimate links with the biochemistry of the brain. The book raises a host of questions - about the shifting cultural norms that favour one type of personality over another at given time; about the possibility that temperament is an inherited trait; about the advisability of purely cosmetic psychopharmacology.