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Artificial Happiness: The Dark Side of the New Happy Class
Books: Text Books: International: Item 1
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Artificial Happiness: The Dark Side of the New Happy Classby Ronald W. Dworkin
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17 of 18 people found the following review helpful: provocative and timely, June 7, 2006 Reviewer:A reader in Lindenhurst (Long Island, NY) - Dworkin's carefully focussed argument about doctors and how they approach medicine profession exposes some serious concerns about the profession. His concern is not about the treatment of real depression, but rather the more specious category in the literature of "minor depression" -- which can mean almost anything -- and doctors have used it to prescribe psychotropic drugs for almost anyone. (The overuse of Ritalin, while a somewhat different case, is another example of the same treat-'em-and-forget-em techniques. Until children start committing suicide.) Reading the whole book very frequently provides a much clearer picture of what an author is saying than reading five pages.
From Publishers Weekly
In this impassioned but hard-to-swallow treatise, Dworkin, an M.D. and senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, laments the rise among primary care physicians of the "ideology" that "unhappiness [is] a disease" to be treated with "external cures" from psychotropic drugs to "obsessive" exercise. This view, he argues, has led doctors to push antidepressants onto patients at an explosive rate. Dworkin argues that primary care doctors initiated and conquered a turf war with psychiatrists in which antidepressants are their main source of power. The author shows how placebo science, the desire for happy patients and a desire for more personal doctoring led to a rise in dubiously beneficial alternative health practices. He belittles the 1980s buzzword "stress" with its accompanying surge of mind-body activities and denigrates the moral deficit he perceives to be underlying a widespread obsession with fitness culture. He also argues that "many Americans are only superficially religious, outwardly professing belief in God while crossing over to medicine for help when life grows really difficult." Dworkin's thesis is provocative but its sweeping claims, heavy reliance on the term "ideology" to describe doctors' motivations and his confrontational approach undermine the book's power to persuade. (June)
Copyright © Reed business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Anesthesiologist and political philosopher Dworkin believes the American public may be headed straight to hell in a psychopharmaceutical handbasket. Drawing together numerous threads of medical occurrence and social change during the last half-century, he weaves a tapestry that portends disaster as millions of children are treated with mood- and thought-altering drugs before they can develop personal moral compasses. It's one thing for adults to pop pills to feel better about issues they feel powerless to alter, he says, and quite another to medicate youngsters rather than teach them how to effect positive change in their lives. He lays basic responsibility for the problem at the feet of primary-care physicians and a de facto mental-health system in which they, rather than psychiatrists, are treating roughly half the nation's mentally ill and medicating for mental illness at more than double the rate that psychiatrists do. But not only psychotropic drugs are implicated. Add alternative medicine and the fitness revolution, and the picture painted by Dworkin's thoughtful evaluation darkens further. Donna Chavez
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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