Salon: Ordinarily Well

A practicing doctor who trained as a psychotherapist and worked with pioneers in psychopharmacology, Peter Kramer combines his patients’ stories with a history of drug research, critiquing the growth of skepticism toward antidepressants and showing how industry-sponsored research findings can be skewed toward desired conclusions. Updating his prior writing about the nature of depression as a destructive illness and the effect of antidepressants on traits like low self-worth, Kramer shows how antidepressants act in practice: less often as miracle cures than as useful tools for helping troubled people achieve an underrated goal?becoming ordinarily well.