Ordinarily Well

The Case for Antidepressants

By: Peter D. Kramer

Narrated by: L. J. Ganser

Length: 10 hrs and 15 mins

Publisher's summary

Do antidepressants work, or are they glorified dummy pills? How can we tell?

In Ordinarily Well, celebrated psychiatrist and author Peter D. Kramer examines the growing controversy about the popular medications. A practicing doctor who trained as a psychotherapist and worked with pioneers in psychopharmacology, Kramer combines moving accounts of his patients' dilemmas with an eye-opening history of drug research to cast antidepressants in a new light.

Kramer homes in on the moment of clinical decision making: prescribe or not? What evidence should doctors bring to bear? Using the wide range of reference that listeners have come to expect in his books, he traces and critiques the growth of skepticism toward antidepressants. He examines industry-sponsored research, highlighting its shortcomings. He unpacks the "inside baseball" of psychiatry statistics and shows how findings can be skewed toward desired conclusions.

Kramer never loses sight of patients. He writes with empathy about his clinical encounters over decades as he weighed treatments, analyzed trial results, and observed medications' influences on his patients' symptoms, behaviors, careers, families, and quality of life. He updates his prior writing about the nature of depression as a destructive illness and the effect of antidepressants on traits like low self-worth. Crucially, he shows how antidepressants act in practice: less often as miracle cures than as useful - and welcome - tools for helping troubled people achieve an underrated goal: becoming ordinarily well.

©2016 Peter D. Kramer (P)2016 Recorded Books

A Mind Changing Experience

I have practiced cardiology over 30 years and am familiar with the depressive effects of serious illness. After the critiques of Kirsch and Angell, I became very skeptical about the benefits of antidepressants. This well reasoned and complex analysis of the issue has changed my mind. If you read this book, Dr Kramer is likely to convince you that antidepressants are imperfect but effective tools that in many cases will produce more benefits than harm. I will now feel more capable of intervening positively when I encounter a life diminished by depression.