ABSTRACT
Dr. Peter Kramer was among the first to publicly observe that the Prozac family of new antidepressant/antipanic drugs (SSRIs) ushered our culture into a new era. A decade later, it is hard to remember how America functioned without them and their successors. Like nature's chemicals, these manmade ones are morally neutral, merely opening new possibilities for how humans experience, or construct, what is meaningful in their lives. There is no one right attitude to take toward their influence, only individual situations, like these cases, to ponder. It would be easier (but a lot less interesting) if the partisans for or against a simplistic "biological psychiatry" had a monopoly on the truth.
This piece appeared in the February 1998 Psychiatric Times.
