Cheer up

book/daddy's happy-happy essay on a number of new books about Anti-depressant America and the backlash against Prozac appears in Salon.com. I figured the essay would spark some talk. It seems a reasonable argument to make (to me), but with enough components to it that people were bound to misread things or have causes to advance and personal stories to recount: Anti-depressants are overprescribed (thanks in part to Big Pharma), sadness is often a normal response to life, yet depression can be a real illness and drug therapy can be an effective means of countering it (when handled properly).

But upon re-reading the essay -- in light of the anger of anti-depressant users responding to it -- I can see how it seems imbalanced, mostly taking shots at what is the current reign of psychopharmacology (although anti-depressant users still feel that they still are a stigmatized group). There are individual lines, of course, where I declare that depression (when serious) operates like a disease, is a serious problem, depressives need medical care, counseling with drug therapy is one of the most successful treatments. But the general tone of the argument leans in the other direction, against the use of pills.

Neverthless, book/daddy hadn't expected the comments to ratchet up quite like this. Many posters have forgotten the original review entirely and are off settling old scores with each other.

Last count: 260 comments posted and still climbing.