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Medic alert.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
To the Editors:
I don't usually respond to reviews, but there were so many inaccuracies and misrepresentations of my book in Theodore Dalrymple's piece ("Forced smiles" September 2006) that I feel compelled to do so.
He says that I am unaware of the real breakthrough signified by the creation of antidepressants like Prozac: their safety. But I emphasize this point--how people sometimes died from taking the older antidepressants--in the very paragraph that heralds Prozac's over-prescription by primary care doctors.
He says I am unaware of the placebo action of antidepressants. On the contrary, I am quite aware, which is why I devote an entire chapter to how the placebo effect can induce artificial happiness, even alluding to the specific placebo properties of antidepressants.
He implies that I agree with Peter Kramer that doctors are closing in on the neurochemical secret behind happiness, only, unlike Kramer, I am horrified by their impending discovery. He is wrong. What horrifies me is that great numbers of people actually think doctors have achieved such a breakthrough, and they use this false belief to justify medicating unhappiness. As I emphasize in the book, the story of Artificial Happiness is not one of science--the science is so primitive as to be almost laughable--but ideology.
He criticizes me for not making a distinction between artificial and real happiness. But I do. My investigation proceeds from the average person's view that real happiness arises when life is going along as a person hopes; artificial happiness, induced by medicine, lets a person feels happy no matter how life is going. This is not rocket science, nor should it be. Mr. Dalrymple calls for a deeper investigation into the ...
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Anthropologists and archaeologists, I believe, are in the habit of naming defunct societies and cultures according to a characteristic artefact that they leave behind them. For example, there was once a Beaker Culture (I seem dimly to recall), though what it did with all those beakers history does
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- Magazine article from: Spectator Dalrymple, Theodore October 25, 2003 700+ words
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- Class ceiling: Theodore Dalrymple says that America's social myths are...
- Magazine article from: Spectator Dalrymple, Theodore June 19, 2004 700+ words
On a number of visits to the United States, I have been told by prosperous, intelligent and highly educated interlocutors that one of the great advantages of the United States compared with Britain is that it is a classless society. (I have been told exactly the same thing in Australia, by the same
- Murder mystery: Theodore Dalrymple believes that many people kill not because...
- Magazine article from: Spectator Dalrymple, Theodore January 7, 2006 700+ words
When one has prepared a number of reports on murderers, both for the prosecution and for the defence, one begins to discern certain patterns. Of course, it is possible that these patterns are not real, or rather are the consequence of the selection of cases that are sent for report. For example,
- Guilt trip: Theodore Dalrymple had some nasty surprises when he moved house...
- Magazine article from: Spectator Dalrymple, Theodore July 2, 2005 700+ words
Psychiatric research, which should never be taken too seriously or be uncritically believed, suggests that moving house is one of the most stressful events in a person's life, not far behind the death of a spouse. Of course, there are spouses and spouses and houses and houses; but whatever the true
- Wannabe yanks: Theodore Dalrymple regrets that we import many of America's...
- Magazine article from: Spectator Dalrymple, Theodore November 22, 2003 700+ words
In the modern world, the availability, indeed ubiquity, of entertainment is the most potent cause of boredom. It causes boredom because the world cannot ever be as fast-moving or dramatic as audiovisual entertainment, and for most of the time interest has to be extracted from the world rather than
- Talking tripe: Theodore Dalrymple visits Quick, France's fast-food chain, and...
- Magazine article from: Spectator Dalrymple, Theodore October 11, 2003 700+ words
When I flew recently to Memphis, Tennessee, the first thing that struck me at the airport was how many of the people (particularly employees) seemed to be wading through an invisible primaeval swamp of high specific gravity. This was because they were so fat that they had to waddle, arms waving at
- Ceausescu kitsch: Theodore Dalrymple on a grisly exhibition in Bucharest that...
- Magazine article from: Spectator Dalrymple, Theodore May 28, 2005 700+ words
You can tell how much Romania has changed even at London airport. There, middle-aged Romanians dressed as European bourgeois wait to get on the aeroplane; I saw a young female executive type, wearing spectacles that cost a peasant's annual income, absorbed in an article about telepathy in a
Source: HighBeam Research, Medic alert.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)