The Psychopharmacologists: Interviews [Hardcover]

David Healy (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1996

This is a collection of interviews with 25 leading figures in the field of psychopharmacology - mind altering drugs. The interviews cover the history and development of the major drugs in the field as well as their marketing usefulness.

Editorial Reviews

Review

'...this book is an enjoyable read for anyone interested in how drugs have come to dominate our discussions of behaviour and in the people involved in this transformation.' The New England Journal of Medicine.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 633 pages
• Publisher: Chapman & Hall; First Edition, First Printing edition (September 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1860360084
• ISBN-13: 978-1860360084
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.5 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,244,810 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A solid oral history of a peculiar profession., January 27, 1999

By 

Robert T. OKEEFFE (Orangeburg, Rockland County, New York) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Psychopharmacologists: Interviews (Hardcover)

David Healy's The Psychopharmacologists is a series of interviews with the "founding fathers" and some of the early "second generation" practitioners of the new science of psychopharmacology, which is not a science in itself but a collection of related disciplines focused on a common set of "brain and behavior" problems. At least one of the interviewees has been practicing psychiatry since the 1930's. As the reader goes through the 25 chapters, he or she will come to make two overarching inferences from a very varied mixture of historical materials. First, the practical treatment effects (not cures, but improvement of symptoms) of the earliest psychiatric drugs caused a rapid undermining of accepted theories of the causes of serious mental illness (primarily schizophrenia and depression). There seemed (and seems) to be no place left for psychoanalytic ideas in explaining and treating these diseases -- a biological model has replaced a psychodynamic one in which thoughts, ideas, and emotions operated in a realm independent of underlying brain processes. If anything has killed Freudian psychotherapy and its warring descendants, it is psychopharmacology (although, the final interview with Tom Ban is wistfully entitled "They used to call it psychiatry"). Second, the old guard within the field (which entails many different new specialties and sub-divisions) has come to the conclusion that there really have been no new breakthroughs in theory and understanding since the 1960's. While we have arrived at the third and fourth generation of professional specialists working in the field, new studies have not altered the basic findings of the late 1950's and the 1960's on how psychotropic drugs work through modifying or modulating neurotransmission to bring about behavioral changes (changes that are hoped to be "therapeutic"). Psychiatric drug development, which is of course competitive and economically driven, has settled on molecule chasing and design -- it comes down to "stereochemistry" combined with clinical trials and guesswork. In many cases how drugs work is known, but why they should or could work is not, that is, no one really knows the "underlying pathophysiology" of serious mental illness. Or is it illnesses? --the possibilities of a unitary spectrum vs multiple discrete "disease entities" are still being debated within biological psychiatry. In addition to the description of how each of the 25 interviewees arrived at his or her own ideas, the reader will find many of them commenting on the philosophic, epistemological, and methodolgical problems that characterize their understanding of human behavior. An incidental merit of the book is getting the "inside stories" (sometimes conflicting) on some of the hotly debated issues of yesteryear. A lot of old grudges (based more on personality conflicts than on scientific ones) are forgiven, and many colorful characters, who were neither fish nor fowl from a specialist's point of view, are given deserved credit for moving this area of research forward. The ideal companion piece to this work will be published about 25 or 30 years in the future, and will be based on interviews with researchers who were raised in the mileux created by the founding fathers but who have suddenly acquired incredibly more powerful experimental tools and equipment. However, when that work is published circa 2025, don't be surprised if mental illness is still not fully understood.