Artificial Happiness - a book review

From The Movie Snob.

Artificial Happiness: The Dark Side of the New Happy Class by Ronald W. Dworkin (Carroll & Graf 2006). This book got a very favorable review from a magazine I read regularly, so I picked it up. I expected a book with lots of stories about the dangers of overprescription of drugs like Prozac, Zoloft, etc. There was a little of that at the beginning, and a little more at the end, but in between is a great slab of text that tries to explain why anti-depressants (and alternative medicine and exercise therapy) have become so over-prescribed, which Dworkin says is also the story of how unhappiness came to be seen as a medical problem. It is a long story about the turf wars between and among primary-care physicians, psychiatrists, neurologists, and even the clergy. Dworkin, an anesthesiologist, somehow even tries to connect the abortion debate to this story. I guess it was sort of interesting, but not compared to the anecdotal stories about how anti-depressants can be counterproductive when prescribed for people suffering from garden-variety unhappiness. Like the guy who realized that he wasn't making anything of himself after college, found himself too overwhelmed to take steps he needed to do anything about it, and found relief through drugs. As Dworkin points out, the drugs didn't push him to improve himself, and in fact they just enabled him to continue stagnating without feeling bad about it. He signs off with a warning about the direction our society might take if a critical mass of people start using these drugs to feel good about themselves regardless of whether they are, in fact, good people.