Medicines out of Control

Abstract

It is easy to imagine—towards the end of the present century—some intellectual descendent of Roy Porter writing a history of medicine in the twentieth century in which the great epidemic of mental distress and chronic unhappiness that characterizes our age will loom very large indeed. But it will also be a puzzle. How did depression and anxiety come to be such a burden on their sufferers, and to make such demands on health services worldwide? In Medicines Out of Control: Antidepressants and the Conspiracy of Goodwill,1 Charles Medawar and Anita Hardon provide an unashamedly partisan account of this history, focusing in particular on a ‘drug crisis in the making’ and an ‘unhealthy dependence on corporate and professional power’. These can be found in the struggles over the nature of depression, the potential for its treatment, and the complex relationship between the great pharmaceutical companies, the medical profession and the various regulatory agencies. Medawar and Hardon's version of these events will make some people in these institutions very angry indeed.