Andrea Tone. The Age of Anxiety: A History of America's Turbulent Affair with Tranquilizers. New York: Basic Books. 2009. Pp. xx, 298. $26.95., David Herzberg. Happy Pills in America: From Miltown to Prozac. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2009. Pp. x, 279. $45.00

Extract

Since its emergence as a field of study some fifty years ago, the history of psychiatry has been dominated by scholarship on the rise and fall of the mental hospital—the asylum—the method of choice in combating mental illness between the French Revolution and the presidency of John F. Kennedy. But not anymore. Recently historians have been paying increasing attention to other facets of psychiatry's past, such as the evolution of diagnostic concepts, the use of somatic therapies such as lobotomies and electroshock, and psychiatry's involvement in the eugenics movement.

This new historiography also includes the enormous impact of psychiatric drug usage on the course of twentieth-century history. As the dust jacket to Andrea Tone's The Age of Anxiety notes, in the early twenty-first century “America has become a nation of pill poppers.” In 2005, twenty-seven million Americans swallowed prescription pills to fight depression alone. That same year, the pharmaceutical industry—often referred to as “Big Pharma”—made over $13 billion manufacturing antidepressant medications. For the many who have ingested a pill to end “the blues,” allay anxiety, curb obsessions, or dispel delusions of grandeur or persecution—or who know loved ones who have—psychiatric drug consumption has deeply affected the lives of millions around the world.