Blue Dreams

January 15, 2018
Psychologist Slater (Playing House) runs through the checkered history of psychopharmacology and mental illness treatments while sharing her own battle with depression and medication in this ambitious work. Slater begins with psychiatry’s first blockbuster drug, Thorazine, which was developed in the early 1950s and seemed to free patients “locked inside psychotic states.” She moves on to discuss the clinical and financial successes of lithium, tricyclic antidepressants, and Prozac and other selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). Slater also relates her own experience with an extensive list of prescriptions and their physical toll on her health, wondering whether she’d have been better off without them: “For thirty-five years, then, I have been trying to soothe my brain with psychiatry’s medicines, but I cannot confidently claim that I am better because of it.” She even questions whether “the pill to cure depression was in fact causing it,” noting the skyrocketing rate of diagnoses since the introduction of antidepressants. In Slater’s view, psychedelics will lead to “our next golden era of psychopharmacology,” along with neural implants that provide a “malleable and reversible form of psychosurgery.” Slater offers many insights here, and her moving personal story truly illuminates the triumphs and shortcomings of psychotropic drugs. Agent: Dorian Karchmar, WME.

December 15, 2017
Weaving together the history of psychopharmacology and her personal experience as a patient, Slater (Playing House, 2013; Prozac Diary, 1998) offers readers a candid and compelling glimpse at life on psychiatric drugs and the science behind them. Trained as a psychologist, she has taken psychotropic medications for 35 years. Some were miraculously effective, others useless and chock-full of side effects. Treatment with Prozac for 17 years resulted in a rapid and robust improvement in her life. It was as if my world had been washed with Windex and everything had an elfin sparkle at its edges. Slater traces the development and increasing utilization of psychiatric medicines beginning in the 1950s with the introduction of Thorazine for schizophrenia. She discusses lithium, tricyclic antidepressants, monoamine oxidase (MAO) inhibitors, and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). Especially interesting are her insights into the use of MDMA (ecstasy) for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), ketamine infusions for depression, and the clinical potential of psychedelic drugs. Slater also reports on the promise of deep brain stimulation (a type of neural implant) for OCD sufferers. Intriguing and instructive.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

October 1, 2017

Who better than the author of Prozac Diary to offer a thoroughgoing history of psychotropic drugs? Science writer Slater tracks back nearly 70 years to Thorazine and lithium, then moves through Prozac and antidepressants to Ecstasy and the new memory drugs, discussing their discovery, their use, and everything we don't know about how they work and indeed how our brains function. With a 100,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.