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The most significant class of antidepressants marketed in recent years is the selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors (SSRIs). Claims of decreased adverse effects (ADRs) and increased safety have led to extensive use of these drugs by non-psychiatrists. The six SSRIs available in the United States are citalopram (Celexa), escitalopram (Lexapro), fluoxetine (Prozac), fluvoxamine (Luvox), paroxetine (Paxil), and sertraline (Zoloft). The primary uses for the SSRIs include unipolar and bipolar major depression and all of the anxiety disorders. However, controlled trials also support the use of SSRIs in the treatment of other psychiatric disorders including dysthymia, pre-menstrual dysphoria, bulimia nervosa, obesity, borderline personality disorder, alcoholism, rheumatic pain, and migraine headache. This new book presents leading-edge research from throughout the world on this topic.
An engrossing memoir-meets-investigative report that takes a fresh, frank look at how we treat depression. Depression is a havoc-wreaking illness that masquerades as personal failing and hijacks your life. After a major suicide attempt in her early twenties, Anna Mehler Paperny resolved to put her reporter’s skills to use to get to know her enemy, setting off on a journey to understand her condition, the dizzying array of medical treatments on offer, and a medical profession in search of answers. Charting the way depression wrecks so many lives, she maps competing schools of therapy, pharmacology, cutting-edge medicine, the pill-popping pitfalls of long-term treatment, the glaring unknowns...
Listen to the podcast here. Recent academic historiography has seen a profusion of theoretical perspectives on biography, both analytical and descriptive. Yet many biographers still fear ‘theory’ as antithetical to accessible narration of real lives. This volume presents eighteen essays by more than a dozen scholars and practitioners from Australia, Belgium, Germany, Great Britain, Holland, Hungary, Iceland, and the United States who seek to banish such fear. Writing with candor, wide experience and familiarity with modern teaching, they examine the riches greeting the biographer willing to think more deeply about biography: its inner workings and rationale in a world still hungry for fact and truth. Contributors are: Nigel Hamilton, Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon, Emma McEwin, Melanie Nolan, Kerstin Maria Pahl, Eric Palmen, Hans Renders, Carl Rollyson, David T. Roth, István M. Szijártó, Jeffrey Tyssens, and David Veltman. See inside the book.
Tizian Zumthurm uses the extraordinary hospital of an extraordinary man to produce novel insights into the ordinary practice of biomedicine in colonial Central Africa. His investigation of therapeutic routines in surgery, maternity care, psychiatry, and the treatment of dysentery and leprosy reveals the incoherent nature of biomedicine and not just in Africa. Reading rich archival sources against and along the grain, the author combines concepts that appeal to those interested in the history of medicine and colonialism. Through the microcosm of the hospital, Zumthurm brings to light the social worlds of Gabonese patients as well as European staff. By refusing to easily categorize colonial medical encounters, the book challenges our understanding of biomedicine as solely domineering or interactive.
In Colonizing Madness Jacqueline Leckie tells a forgotten story of silence, suffering, and transgressions in the colonial Pacific. It offers new insights into a history of Fiji by entering the Pacific Islands’ most enduring psychiatric institution—St Giles Psychiatric Hospital—established as Fiji’s Public Lunatic Asylum in 1884. Her nuanced study reveals a microcosm of Fiji’s indigenous, migrant, and colonial communities and examines how individuals and communities lived with the label of madness in an ethnically complex island society. Tracking longitudinal change from the 1880s to the present in the construction and treatment of mental disorder in Fiji, the book emphasizes the co...
This book explores the impact of developments in pharmaceutical medicine in the twentieth century on a Christian ethical evaluation of transhumanism and future "hi-tech" medical enhancement technologies. It suggests that the Christian ethical assessment of proposed future radical transhumanist biomedical technologies should be conducted in the light of responses to past medical advances. Two specific case studies are featured, focusing on the oral contraceptive pill and on Prozac and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants. Whilst future biomedical technologies may have therapeutic benefits for the relief of disease and contribute to improving human health and welfare, the book considers the implications for society and their acceptability as therapies from a Christian perspective. Stressing the inadequacy of natural law alone, the author proposes an ethical framework for assessing novel biomedical technologies according to the effects on personal autonomy, embodiment and bodily life, and on the imago Dei.
This brilliant portrait of schizophrenia--the most malignant and least understood mental illness--by renowned psychiatrist Jeffrey Lieberman, Chair of Columbia's legendary Psychiatry department, interweaves cultural and scientific history with dramatic patient portraits and clinical experiences to impart a revolutionary message of hope: that for the first time in human history, schizophrenia can not just be effectively treated, but even prevented. Of the many myths and misconceptions that have historically obscured our understanding of schizophrenia, the most pernicious is that there is no effective treatment or cure. The reality couldn't be more different: the truth is that today's treatmen...
An award-winning historian presents an emotional history of Jewish refugees biding their time in Portugal as they attempt to escape Nazi Europe This riveting book describes the dramatic experiences of Jewish refugees as they fled Hitler's regime and then lived in limbo in Portugal until they could reach safer havens abroad. Drawing attention not only to the social and physical upheavals these refugees experienced, Marion Kaplan also highlights their feelings as they fled their homes and histories, while having to beg strangers for kindness. Portugal's dictator, António de Oliveira Salazar, admitted the largest number of Jews fleeing westward--tens of thousands of them--but then set his secret police on those who did not move along quickly enough. Yet Portugal's people left a lasting impression on refugees for their caring and generosity. Most refugees in Portugal showed strength and stamina as they faced unimagined challenges. An emotional history of fleeing, this book probes how specific locations touched refugees' inner lives, including the borders they nervously crossed or the overcrowded transatlantic ships that signaled their liberation.
Throughout most of history, in China the insane were kept within the home and treated by healers who claimed no specialized knowledge of their condition. In the first decade of the twentieth century, however, psychiatric ideas and institutions began to influence longstanding beliefs about the proper treatment for the mentally ill. In The Invention of Madness, Emily Baum traces a genealogy of insanity from the turn of the century to the onset of war with Japan in 1937, revealing the complex and convoluted ways in which “madness” was transformed in the Chinese imagination into “mental illness.” Focusing on typically marginalized historical actors, including municipal functionaries ...
"Exorbitant prices for lifesaving drugs, safety recalls affecting tens of millions of Americans, and soaring rates of addiction and overdose on prescription opioids have caused many to lose faith in pharmaceutical companies. Now, Americans are demanding national reckoning with a monolithic industry. In Pharma, award-winning journalist and New York Times best-selling author Gerald Posner uncovers the real story of the Sacklers, the family that became one of America's wealthiest from the success of OxyContin, their blockbuster narcotic painkiller at the centure of the opioid crisis. The unexpected twists and turns of the Sakler family saga are told against the startling chronicle of a powerful industry that sits at the intersection of public health and profits. Pharma reveals how and why American drug companies have put earnings ahead of patients"--