Ordinarily Well, Peter D. Kramer
Ordinarily Well, Peter D. Kramer
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Ordinarily Well
The Case for Antidepressants

Author: Peter D. Kramer

Narrator: L.J. Ganser

Unabridged: 10 hr 15 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 06/07/2016


Synopsis

Do antidepressants work, or are they glorified dummy pills? How can we tell? In Ordinarily Well, the 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 readers 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 psychiatrystatisticsand 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' influence on his patients' symptoms, behavior, 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 goalbecoming ordinarily well.

About Peter D. Kramer

Peter D. Kramer is a psychiatrist and faculty member of Brown Medical School specializing in the area of clinical depression


Reviews

Goodreads review by Melissa on June 13, 2016

Like Gawande and Sacks, psychiatrist Peter Kramer's narrative is simultaneously clinically intriguing, historically relevant, and surprisingly down-to-earth. In describing antidepressant research, he explains and bridges the divides between psychotherapy and psychopharmacology, independent- and indu......more

Goodreads review by Ang on June 24, 2016

This is well-worth reading if you've read any of those scary anti-depressant headlines recently (work the same as placebo! only good for severe depression!) and wondered, well shit, is that true? (Even if you know the answer because you know how they've helped you.) It's not true, not really, and Kra......more

Goodreads review by Kate on February 06, 2017

I wanted to read this because anti-depressants have not worked for me. I have tried around ten or so of them, and had mostly bad side effects and no lifting of depression. I had also read a lot about the case against them (after trying them), about the unpublished studies that show how poor the outc......more

Goodreads review by Jonathan on March 23, 2018

An important corrective to a lot of the overblown critiques, some of which amount simply to pill-shaming.......more

Goodreads review by Siel on December 06, 2019

I was captivated by Listening to Prozac when I read it like a decade ago, so I was curious about Peter’s followup. This book lays out Peter’s argument that antidepressants really do help a lot of people and powerfully forestall or delay what used to be progressive diseases of the mind that completel......more