Before Prozac. The Troubled History of Mood Disorders in Psychiatry: By Edward Shorter. Oxford University Press, 2008 Reviewed by S. Nassir Ghaemi

Abstract

The field of history of medicine, prior to the mid-twentieth century, was largely an antiquarian’s delight, devoted mostly to showing the inevitable progress of medicine. In that sense, it was a reflection of the meliorist, evolutionary ideology of the late nineteenth century. Two world wars shook that confidence, and, especially in post-war France, history of medicine was reborn as part and parcel of the postmodernist movement, an approach to culture that involved a deep rejection of the Enlightenment tradition. Ironically, a founding tome of the postmodernist movement was a book on the history of psychiatry (Foucault’s famed work Madness and Civilization). It followed that history of medicine (and history of psychiatry more specifically) became a largely postmodernist discipline: where there had been order, there was now Brownian motion; where progress, regression; where logic, power; where reason, money. The new histories of medicine, especially from the 1960s onward, reflected this revisionism, and the corresponding academic journals today, like , would automatically reject, with disdain, any paper that dared breathe the word “progress.” The old catechism has become the new heresy; the old heresy now excommunication-worthy doctrine.