Peter D. Kramer

Harvard Book Store welcomes psychiatrist PETER D. KRAMER, the bestselling author of Against Depression and Listening to Prozac, for a discussion of his latest book, Ordinarily Well: The Case for Antidepressants.

About Ordinarily Well

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 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’ 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 goal—becoming ordinarily well. 

Praise

"In this provocative and personal book, Kramer begins with the premise that he speaks in the voice of 'clinician as sinner.' For Kramer, the clinician's sin is to complicate the simpler story told by the randomized trials, the clerical voice in drug research. He makes the case that the studies need the narrative and the narratives need the studies. We have taken sides in a culture war in psychiatry that we can’t afford. Patients' well-being, indeed their very lives, depend on a declaration of peace. Ordinarily Well makes a compelling case for humility. Sometimes medications work but imperfectly or they work for a while but need to be changed. And sometimes they work when supplemented by the insight that only conversation can provide." —Sherry Turkle, Professor of the Social Studies of Science, MIT, and author of Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age and Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less from Each Other

"Kramer makes an energetic and personal case for the role of antidepressants in easing crippling depression." —Publishers Weekly