Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #636424 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 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

About the Author

Customer Reviews

right on
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.

haven't really thought about it before
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.

You will love it or you will hate it.
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!