Listening to Prozac

Listening to Prozac
Author: Peter D. Kramer
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 481
Release: 1997-09-01
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0140266712

The New York Times bestselling examination of the revolutionary antidepressant, with a new introduction and afterword reflecting on Prozac’s legacy and the latest medical research “Peter Kramer is an analyst of exceptional sensitivity and insight. To read his prose on virtually any subject is to be provoked, enthralled, illuminated.” —Joyce Carol Oates When antidepressants like Prozac first became available, Peter D. Kramer prescribed them, only to hear patients say that on medication, they felt different—less ill at ease, more like the person they had always imagined themselves to be. Referencing disciplines from cellular biology to animal ethology, Dr. Kramer worked to explain these reports. The result was Listening to Prozac, a revolutionary book that offered new perspectives on antidepressants, mood disorders, and our understanding of the self—and that became an instant national and international bestseller. In this thirtieth anniversary edition, Dr. Kramer looks back at the influence of his groundbreaking book, traces progress in the relevant sciences, follows trends in the use and public understanding of antidepressants, and assesses potential breakthroughs in the treatment of depression. The new introduction and afterword reinforce and reinvigorate a book that the New York Times called “originally insightful” and “intelligent and informative,” a window on a medicine that is “telling us new things about the chemistry of human character.”

Antidepressants

Antidepressants
Author: Matthew Macaluso
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 435
Release: 2019-05-31
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 3030109496

This volume reviews the known neurobiology of depression and combines classic data on antidepressant treatments with modern theory on the physiology of depression. It also discusses novel mechanism of action drugs.

Evidence-biased Antidepressant Prescription

Evidence-biased Antidepressant Prescription
Author: Michael P. Hengartner
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 355
Release: 2021-12-09
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 3030825876

This book addresses the over-prescribing of antidepressants in people with mostly mild and subthreshold depression. It outlines the steep increase in antidepressant prescription and critically examines the current scientific evidence on the efficacy and safety of antidepressants in depression. The book is not only concerned with the conflicting views as to whether antidepressants are useful or ineffective in various forms of depression, but also aims at detailing how flaws in the conduct and reporting of antidepressant trials have led to an overestimation of benefits and underestimation of harms. The transformation of the diagnostic concept of depression from a rare but serious disorder to an over-inclusive, highly prevalent but predominantly mild and self-limiting disorder is central to the books argument. It maintains that biological reductionism in psychiatry and pharmaceutical marketing reframed depression as a brain disorder, corroborating the overemphasis on drug treatment in both research and practice. Finally, the author goes on to explore how pharmaceutical companies have distorted the scientific literature on the efficacy and safety of antidepressants and how patient advocacy groups, leading academics, and medical organisations with pervasive financial ties to the industry helped to promote systematically biased benefit-harm evaluations, affecting public attitudes towards antidepressants as well as medical education, training, and practice.

Next Generation Antidepressants

Next Generation Antidepressants
Author: Chad E. Beyer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 151
Release: 2010-05-20
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1139833030

The World Health Organization defines depression as a primary contributor to the global burden of disease and predicts it will become the second leading cause of death by 2020. The need to develop effective therapies has never been so pressing. Current antidepressant drugs have several limitations. This 2010 book looks at the future of mood-disorder research, covering the identification of new therapeutic targets, establishing new preclinical models, new medicinal chemistry opportunities, and fostering greater understanding of genetic influences. These strategies are likely to help build a better picture of the disease process, and lead to new opportunities for patient stratification and treatment. The ultimate goal for this strand of research is to develop more personalized and effective treatments for this chronic and debilitating condition. This is essential reading for all those involved in psychopharmacologic drug development, and mental health clinicians seeking a preview of discoveries soon to influence their practice.

Ordinarily Well

Ordinarily Well
Author: Peter D. Kramer
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2016-06-07
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0374708967

Do antidepressants work, or are they glorified dummy pills? How can we tell? In Ordinarily Well, the celebrated psychiatrist and author 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 that readers have come to expect in his books, he traces and critiques the growth of skepticism toward antidepressants. He examines industry-sponsored research, highlighting its shortcomings. He unpacks the “inside baseball” of psychiatry—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. He updates his prior writing about the nature of depression as a destructive illness and the effect of antidepressants on traits like low self-worth. 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.

Methods of Behavior Analysis in Neuroscience

Methods of Behavior Analysis in Neuroscience
Author: Jerry J. Buccafusco
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2000-08-29
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1420041819

Using the most well-studied behavioral analyses of animal subjects to promote a better understanding of the effects of disease and the effects of new therapeutic treatments on human cognition, Methods of Behavior Analysis in Neuroscience provides a reference manual for molecular and cellular research scientists in both academia and the pharmaceutic

The Emperor's New Drugs

The Emperor's New Drugs
Author: Irving Kirsch
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2010-01-26
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0465021042

Do antidepressants work? Of course -- everyone knows it. Like his colleagues, Irving Kirsch, a researcher and clinical psychologist, for years referred patients to psychiatrists to have their depression treated with drugs before deciding to investigate for himself just how effective the drugs actually were. Over the course of the past fifteen years, however, Kirsch's research -- a thorough analysis of decades of Food and Drug Administration data -- has demonstrated that what everyone knew about antidepressants was wrong. Instead of treating depression with drugs, we've been treating it with suggestion. The Emperor's New Drugs makes an overwhelming case that what had seemed a cornerstone of psychiatric treatment is little more than a faulty consensus. But Kirsch does more than just criticize: he offers a path society can follow so that we stop popping pills and start proper treatment for depression.

Stahl's Illustrated Antidepressants

Stahl's Illustrated Antidepressants
Author: Stephen M. Stahl
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 199
Release: 2009-03-02
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1139833014

All of the titles in the Stahl's Illustrated Series are designed to be fun. Concepts are illustrated by full-color images that will be familiar to all readers of Stahl's Essential Psychopharmacology, 3rd Edition and The Prescriber's Guide. The texts in this user-friendly series can be supplements to figures, images, and tables. The visual learner will find that these books make psychopharmacology concepts easy to master, while the non-visual learner will enjoy a shortened text version of complex psychopharmacology concepts. Within each book, each chapter builds on previous chapters, synthesizing information from basic biology and diagnostics to building treatment plans and dealing with complications and comorbidities. Novices may want to approach Stahl's Illustrated Series by first looking through all the graphics and gaining a feel for the visual vocabulary. Readers more familiar with these topics should find that going back and forth between images and text provides an interaction with which to vividly conceptualize complex pharmacologies. And, to help guide the reader toward more in-depth learning about particular concepts, each book ends with a Suggested Reading section.

When Antidepressants Aren't Enough

When Antidepressants Aren't Enough
Author: Stuart J. Eisendrath, MD
Publisher: New World Library
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2019-10-01
Genre: Self-Help
ISBN: 1608685977

For nearly two decades, Dr. Stuart Eisendrath has been researching and teaching the therapeutic effects of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) with people experiencing clinical depression. By helping them recognize that they can find relief by changing how they relate to their thoughts, Eisendrath has seen dramatic improvements in people's quality of life, as well as actual, measurable brain changes. Easily practiced breath exercises, meditations, and innovative visualizations release readers from what can often feel like the tyranny of their thoughts. Freedom of thought, feeling, and action is the life-altering result.