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Opinion: What antidepressants are saying 30 years after the publication of ‘Listening to Prozac’
In 1993, I published “Listening to Prozac,” a book that grew out of my clinical experience prescribing what was then a new class of medications, ones thought to moderate depression through their effect on the way that the brain handles the neurotransmitter serotonin.
Some of my patients had reported marked favorable reactions to the drugs — first Prozac and, soon after, Zoloft. On medication, the patients were more confident, less anxious, and less pessimistic. They felt better than they had even before the episode of whatever it was that we were treating, depression or increased obsessionality. One patient said that she was herself at last, as if, absent the formulation of the new drug, she would never have been herself. In the book, I tried to explain how those effects might occur and then to discuss implications for medical ethics and society at large. How malleable is the self? How open are we to technologies that might change it?
