The Creation of Psychopharmacology by David Healy, Harvard, $39.95, ISBN 0674006194
IT USED to be all repressed urges or childhood abuse. Now, the root cause of sadness is low levels of serotonin. Psychobabble has given way to biobabble. And as psychotropic drugs to treat the levels of feel-good brain chemicals proliferate, the definitions of all kinds of mental suffering are changing.
Everything from catatonia to shyness, it seems, is now a biological process that drugs can cure. We are now “medicalising distress”, as David Healy says in his remarkably thorough history of the phenomenon, The Creation of Psychopharmacology.
Healy, a…
