Horwitz, Allan

Despite the eventual failure of the medication, Mike s taste of drug success solidified his commitment to a biomedical view of his illness. His experience was profound enough to foster his belief in what the sociologist Allan Horwitz has called diagnostic psychiatry, with its unflinching commitment to biochemical solutions. Such a belief system is nearly always the backdrop for years of experimentation with a series of medications. ... 

Moreover, experimental studies are often inconclusive. Rarely does the antidepressant medication far exceed the placebo in effectiveness, and sometimes subjects in the control group actually report greater symptom relief Equally important, the newer classes of antidepressant medications (the SSRIs), hyped as the latest wonder drugs, are actually no more effective than categories of medications (for example, tricyclic antidepressants) that were discovered in the late I950s. Finally, these studies have no way to assess whether medications work better than positive life changes. The sociologist Allan Horwitz asks ... 

Allan Horwitz, Creating Mental Illness (Chicago University of Chicago Press, 2002). 

More and more people in modern sodely are using behavior-modifying drugs. Ritalin helps correct attention deficit disorder and Prozac relieves depression. Thomas 1. Farrell has suggested that there is a vast conspiracy to medicate normal sadness in his review of the book The Loss of Sadness by Allan V. Horwitz and Jerome C. Wakefield (August 25,2007). In our contemporary American culture, people take a pill to make sadness go away, despite the fact that sadness may serve a healthy psychological purpose. 

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