Ordinarily Well

"Ambitious, persuasive, and important . . . [Kramer] doesn't just make a case for antidepressants. He makes a case for psychiatry itself." —Jonathan Rosen, The Atlantic

Do antidepressants work, or are they glorified placebos?


In Ordinarily Well, the celebrated psychiatrist Peter D. Kramer examines the growing controversy about the popular medications. A practicing doctor who trained as a psychotherapist and worked with pioneers in psychopharmacology, Kramer combines moving accounts of his patients' dilemmas with an eye-opening history of drug research to cast antidepressants in a new light.


Kramer homes in on the moment of clinical decision making: Prescribe or not? What evidence should doctors bring to bear? Using the wide range of reference, he traces and critiques the growth of skepticism toward antidepressants. He examines industry-sponsored research, highlighting its shortcomings. He unpacks statistics and shows how findings can be skewed toward desired conclusions.


Kramer never loses sight of patients. He writes with empathy about his clinical encounters over decades as he weighed treatments, analyzed trial results, and observed medications' influence on his patients' symptoms, behavior, careers, families, and quality of life. Crucially, he shows how antidepressants act in practice: less often as miracle cures than as useful, and welcome, tools for helping troubled people achieve an underrated goal—becoming ordinarily well.

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

"Dr. Kramer . . . has done something very valuable: . . . his dissections of the most incendiary studies are careful, and his conclusions . . . will invite a reckoning." —The New York Times

"Offers a carefully argued and convincing case that antidepressants not only work but also are an essential tool in the treatment of depression." —The Associated Press

"Moving." —The Washington Post