Blue Dreams
The Science and the Story of the Drugs that Changed Our Minds
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- $229.00
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- $229.00
Descripción editorial
The explosive story of the discovery and development of psychiatric medications, as well as the science and the people behind their invention, told by a riveting writer and psychologist who shares her own experience with the highs and lows of psychiatric drugs.
Although one in five Americans now takes at least one psychotropic drug, the fact remains that nearly seventy years after doctors first began prescribing them, not even their creators understand exactly how or why these drugs work -- or don't work -- on what ails our brains.
Lauren Slater's revelatory account charts psychiatry's journey from its earliest drugs, Thorazine and lithium, up through Prozac and other major antidepressants of the present. Blue Dreams also chronicles experimental treatments involving Ecstasy, magic mushrooms, the most cutting-edge memory drugs, placebos, and even neural implants. In her thorough analysis of each treatment, Slater asks three fundamental questions: how was the drug born, how does it work (or fail to work), and what does it reveal about the ailments it is meant to treat?
Fearlessly weaving her own intimate experiences into comprehensive and wide-ranging research, Slater narrates a personal history of psychiatry itself. In the process, her powerful and groundbreaking exploration casts modern psychiatry's ubiquitous wonder drugs in a new light, revealing their ability to heal us or hurt us, and proving an indispensable resource not only for those with a psychotropic prescription but for anyone who hopes to understand the limits of what we know about the human brain and the possibilities for future treatments.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Psychologist Slater (Playing House) runs through the checkered history of psychopharmacology and mental illness treatments while sharing her own battle with depression and medication in this ambitious work. Slater begins with psychiatry's first blockbuster drug, Thorazine, which was developed in the early 1950s and seemed to free patients "locked inside psychotic states." She moves on to discuss the clinical and financial successes of lithium, tricyclic antidepressants, and Prozac and other selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). Slater also relates her own experience with an extensive list of prescriptions and their physical toll on her health, wondering whether she'd have been better off without them: "For thirty-five years, then, I have been trying to soothe my brain with psychiatry's medicines, but I cannot confidently claim that I am better because of it." She even questions whether "the pill to cure depression was in fact causing it," noting the skyrocketing rate of diagnoses since the introduction of antidepressants. In Slater's view, psychedelics will lead to "our next golden era of psychopharmacology," along with neural implants that provide a "malleable and reversible form of psychosurgery." Slater offers many insights here, and her moving personal story truly illuminates the triumphs and shortcomings of psychotropic drugs.
