The creation of psychopharmacology

addicts emerging not from the traditional milieu changes. As pharmaceutical companies gained of the urban underclass but from the white control over research and the subsequent suburban middle-classes, and from the 1980s marketing of drug therapies, the faith in science with the disastrous spread of HIV/AIDS, gave increasingly meant a faith in pharmaceutical impetus to new non-medical movements like companies. Healy contends that the resulting Narcotics Anonymous and began to refocus corporate control produces a culture that was and medical resources away from the attempt to is dominated by the dictates of a pharmaceutical eliminate drug use towards public health market rather than the needs of public health. initiatives like methadone and needle exchange. Healy combines an impressive collection of This recent-and still only partial-shift of contemporary medical publications from the emphasis makes Acker's book especially timely, nineteenth and twentieth centuries with a variety revealing the pathological paradigm of the early of secondary works to construct a comprehensive twentieth century to have been not so much history of psychopharmacology. His book the application of modern science that it claimed offers a number of colourful anecdotes that to be, as a vestigial, though powerful and breathe life into a chronologically-organized massively-funded, extension of the generation chain of discoveries and developments. of Victorian "moral management" which In the first half of the book, Healy provides an preceded it. historical analysis of developments before the Second World War, concentrating on Mike Jay, professional accomplishments, controversies, London and individual researchers that contributed to the proliferation of psychopharmacological David Healy, The creation of therapies in modern western medicine. In the psychopharmacology, Cambridge, MA, and latter half of the book, he identifies the growing medical research and offers a more explicit political critique of the corporate agenda. Does marketing determine culture? And, what Intermittently, Healy uses comparisons with influence does culture have on modern western Japanese case studies, as a non-western example medicine? These questions are central to David of responses to modern psychopharmacology, Healy's latest contribution to the history of to reinforce the substantial differences in cultural medicine in his provocative study of the rise of attitudes towards mental illness. By the book's psychopharmacology. This book examines the conclusion, readers are left with a bleak intersection of commercial and scientific prognosis for the disentanglement of corporate interests in an historical investigation of interests from western medicine and, moreover, the growing influence of pharmaceutical western culture. …