Artificial Happiness
Subtitle: The Dark Side of the New Happy Class
Publisher: Carroll & Graf
Published: April 25, 2006
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 336
ISBN-13: 9780786717149
Subjects: Pharmacology; Social, group or collective psychology; Pharmacology (Specific Aspects); Psychology; Social Psychology; Psychology & Psychiatry / Social Psychology; Psychiatry - Psychopharmacology; Emotions; Antidepressants; Depression, Mental; Happiness; Physiological aspects
First sentence: FIVE YEARS AGO, a woman asked me to put her son on Prozac.
Description: Examines the rise of psychotropic drugs; alternative medicine; the belief in endorphins as a way to maximize health through exercise; and medicine's investigations of spirituality — all during the past thirty years — fitting them together into a story that puts Americans at the center of a novel social experiment: helping people feel happy independent of the facts in their lives. Though well-intentioned, Dworkin identifies a dark side, asserting that Prozac, for instance, is freezing people in unsatisfactory relationships and jobs, nullifying their impulse to change, because of the "happiness" induced by the medicine. – from publisher description.