How we fell for antidepressants

The French novelist, Michel Houellebecq, with his accustomed acuity about modern culture, titled his last novel but one Serotonin. By then, of course, this famous neurochemical had become the key to a perfect human existence, too little or too much of it resulting in all the little problems that continue to plague mankind. If only we could get the chemical balance in our brains right, all would be well, life would return to its normal bliss!

After the commercialisation of Prozac, people started talking about the chemical balance in their brains in much the same way as they talked about the ingredients of a recipe. As Peter D. Kramer put it in his book published in Britain in 1994, Listening to Prozac:

By now, asking about the virtue of Prozac… may seem like asking whether it was good thing for Freud to have discovered the unconscious… Like psychoanalysis, Prozac exerts influence not only in its interaction with individual patients, but through it influence on contemporary thought.