Peter D. Kramer is a psychiatrist, writer, and Brown Medical School professor. Among his books are Against Depression, Should You Leave? and the New York Times bestseller Listening to Prozac. His articles and book reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate, and elsewhere. In Ordinarily Well: The Case for Anti-Depressants (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Kramer examines the growing controversy about the popular medications. Kramer combines moving accounts of his patients’ dilemmas with an eye-opening history of drug research to cast antidepressants in a new light. He writes with empathy about his clinical encounters over decades as he weighed treatments, analyzed trial results, and observed medications’ influence on his patients’ symptoms, behavior, careers, families, and quality of life. Crucially, he shows how antidepressants act in practice: less often as miracle cures than as useful, and welcome, tools for helping troubled people achieve an underrated goal―becoming ordinarily well.
