Can't Miss It: Monday

On Presidents Day, it's time to pause for some quiet reflection on our drug use. Too much? Too little? Just right? Tonight Yale's Charles Barber drops in on the Elliott Bay Book Co. to report that in 2006 the U.S. accounted for 66% of the global antidepressant market. We know, it's exciting to be number one! There's a lot more in his book, Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry is Medicating a Nation.

He reports that 33 million Americans took a psychiatric drug in 2004. He finds abundant signs that the stigma of mental illness is decreasing, a change he deems ominous because of the accompanying growth in comfort with medication use. Barber mounts the customary attack on psychiatry's promiscuous diagnosing, the FDA's toothless oversight, Big Pharma's baneful influence, and the society's embrace of reductionistic theories of the mind. Barber does believe that medication, and not psychotherapy, is the best treatment for serious depression; but he says that most antidepressants are prescribed for ill-defined maladies for which drugs are ineffectual.

7:30pm // Elliott Bay Book Co. // FREE

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