Drugs That Changed Our Minds

The messy history and brave future of psychotropic drugs O MagazineVivid and thought-provoking HarpersMagazineAmbitious...Slaters depictions of madness are terrifying and fascinating USA TodayVigorous research and intimate reflectionhighly compelling Kirkus As our approach to mental illness has oscillated from biological to psychoanalytical and back again, so have our treatments. With the rise of psychopharmacology, an ever-increasing number of people throughout the globe are taking a psychotropic drug, yet nearly seventy years after doctors first began prescribing them, we still don't really know exactly how or why they workor don't work on what ails our brains. In The Drugs that Changed Our Minds, Lauren Slater offers an explosive account not just of the science but of the people inventors, detractors and consumers behind our narcotics, from the earliest, Thorazine and Lithium, up through Prozac, Ecstasy, magic mushrooms, the most cutting-edge memory drugs and neural implants. In so doing, she narrates the history of psychiatry itself and illuminates the signature its colourful little capsules have left on millions of brains worldwide, and how these wonder drugs may heal us or hurt us.