On Prozac: Debating the New Technologies of Mind

"DANGER: These drugs may offer pseudo-solutions to real problems"

The quip above succinctly describes how controversial antidepressants have become in our day. Yet equally, the arrival of the new generation of 'psychoanalgesics"—psychic painkillers—has been celebrated as a breakthrough in the treatment of depression and other psychological afflictions.

An odd thirty years after the first approved use of antidepressants, a new class of drugs, the Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs), have appeared on the market. The first of these became known by its brand name—Prozac©. Since then the word "Prozac" has come to be used as a placeholder in a slew of publications—Listening to Prozac, Prozac Backlash, and Prozac Nation, to mention a few. In our forum, "On Prozac," we use the brand name in that general sense: as a stand-in for the current generation of SSRIs, and other related new drugs, created to treat psychological problems by altering what is regarded as their physical substrate—brain chemsitry.

The rates at which these antidepressants are prescribed has exploded. In the United States alone, antidepressants use tripled in the 1990s. The National Center for Health Statistics reported that in 2002, for example, over 38 visit per 100 women involved these drugs—nearly double the rate in 1996. Roughly seven percent of the adult population is currently on an antidepressant. Even more controversially, more and more children and adolescents are now consuming these drugs. And the conditions fo which they are consumed have also exploded—beyond depression, to incude social anxiety, stress, and premenstrual syndrome among others.

The rapid adoption of antidepressants in our time—which surprised even pharmaceutical companies—has outpaced efforts to carry on pubic deliberation aout the consequences and desirabiity of this massive change in the way our society treats emotional distress. Concerns persist regarding the efficacy of these medications, the ethics of pharmaceutical treatments, harmful side-effects, and the plausability and consequences of treating depression as a disease of biochemical origin.

The 2005 forum, "On Prozac," will take place on Thursday, November 10. The aim of our forum is to encourage public discussion of this significant modern-day development. The panel members, which feature a range of recognized authorities on various aspects of antidepressants, will address ethical, medical, social, philosophical, and environmental dimensions of antidepressant use. A series of background and follow-up sessions will fill in with up-to-date materials and allow for audience participation. Session topics include history of antidepressants, the viability of clinicl trials, how antidepressants are represented in the popular culture, and alternative perspectives on what many regard as an epidemic—depression.