Artificial Happiness: The Dark Side of the New Happy Class [Hardcover]

Ronald W. Dworkin M.D. (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 25, 2006

Ronald Dworkin, Fellow at the Hudson Institute, has written a book of social commentary that combines the politics of healthcare and medical ethics with several momentous changes that have dramatically altered the relationship among doctors and patients, creating what Dworkin dubs "artificial happiness." He 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.

Editorial Reviews

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

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Carroll & Graf; annotated edition edition (April 25, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786717149
• ISBN-13: 978-0786717149
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,396,062 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

37 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars right on, July 9, 2006

By 

hiking guy (reno, nevada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Artificial Happiness: The Dark Side of the New Happy Class (Hardcover)

Great book. I went to my primary care doctor recently, just for a check-up. I've also been having some trouble in my private life and I got a little sad when talking about it with him. First thing he said was that maybe he should write me a prescription for Zoloft. It was ridiculous. How was Zoloft going to fix my life? Take this and multiply it by thirty million people and you got Dr. Dworkin's book. I read the other reviews of his book on this site. I don't know why the bad ones defend their psychiatrists. Dr. Dworkin doesn't blame the psychiatrists. He blames the primary care doctors. Sounds like they didn't read the book.

33 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars haven't really thought about it before, July 8, 2006

By 

angela (new york) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Artificial Happiness: The Dark Side of the New Happy Class (Hardcover)

I've been a nurse for fifteen years. I've noticed the things the author talks about in health care, but I never thought they were connected in any way. The way he connects them is really original and interesting. And he's right. I know a lot of people taking Prozac for unhappiness and not really for clinical depression. The author is really careful about separating real depression from unhappiness. He thinks depression, not unhappiness, should be treated with drugs. The book was easy reading. And a fun read too. But I really learned a lot about doctors and neuroscience and alternative medicine. I even sort of changed my views on some things.

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars You will love it or you will hate it., August 9, 2006

By 

GP Weyble (Amherst, VA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Artificial Happiness: The Dark Side of the New Happy Class (Hardcover)

I loved this book, "Artificial Happiness", because the author articulated in a well thought and researched fashion exactly what has not been discussed enough. Unhappiness is NOT a disease. Unhappiness, contrary to pharmaceutical advertisements and "doctors advice" is a natural and normal consequence of the "downs" in the "ups & downs" of life. It is the red light on the dashboards of our lives that prompts us to make constructive changes. Or it was.
For well over 2000 years the greatest thinkers in Western Civilization have puzzled over and written about "happiness" and what constitutes "the good life". Their words and thoughts are there and free for the taking. Few people are interested.
Enter...pharmaceutical marketing and the dis-ease merchants. Today tens of millions are sold, for huge profits, on the nonsensical idea that people's brains just don't work right any more. They have become "unbalanced" and get balanced again with drugs. [read: It's not your fault.]
At last someone in the medical field has had the courage to write what has always been obvious to many. Life is what we make it...garbage in, garbage out.....bad decision making leads to bad outcomes. BRAVO!