CHALLENGING a multibillion-dollar global industry is bound to be an uncomfortable mission, all the more so if you risk being accused of promoting suffering, being a denialist, or even of culpable ignorance. Few writers who take on the mental health industry can be doing it for the money or in the hopes of sales matching Peter Kramer‘s 1990s hit Listening to Prozac.
It was Kramer who coined the phrase “cosmetic psychopharmacology” to describe a not-too-distant utopia in which drugs such as the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor Prozac, normally used to treat depression, would be used to enhance or…
