Louis Menand - Head Case: Can psychiatry be a science?

A nice look at the promises and perils of modern psychopharmacology by everybody’s favorite New Yorker, Louis Menand:

The recommendation from people who have written about their own depression is, overwhelmingly, Take the meds!

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What if your sadness was grief, though? And what if there were a pill that relieved you of the physical pain of bereavement—sleeplessness, weeping, loss of appetite—without diluting your love for or memory of the dead? Assuming that bereavement “naturally” remits after six months, would you take a pill today that will allow you to feel the way you will be feeling six months from now anyway? Probably most people would say no.

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Or do we resist the grief pill because we believe that bereavement is doing some work for us? Maybe we think that since we appear to have been naturally selected as creatures that mourn, we shouldn’t short-circuit the process. Or is it that we don’t want to be the kind of person who does not experience profound sorrow when someone we love dies? Questions like these are the reason we have literature and philosophy. No science will ever answer them.

The early Chinese were pretty insistent that mourning is the basis of morality. The thought of one’s dead parents being eaten by wild dogs inspires a chill down the spine and from that chill comes the rituals that make us human.