MixedBookforumMixing memoir, history, and medical reporting, she brings a deep appreciation of all the hope that has gone into these drugs, both among those who make them and those who take them. She also brings her ambivalence, based on her own experiences with several of the medications she explores ... Blue Dreams is at its best when it portrays people, first and foremost Slater herself, struggling to make them. This comes across most powerfully in the chapters on antidepressants. Much of what she has to say will be familiar to anyone who has taken an interest in the topic; for those who have yet to, this is a fine place to start, less because her account reflects the latest research—for that, readers should look elsewhere—than because it humanizes the issues involved ... for a book that puts so much emphasis on the question of efficacy, it includes surprisingly little recent research on the topic. Blue Dreams often feels oddly out of date. Nowhere is this more evident than in Slater’s discussion of psychotherapy, where she relies almost entirely on a single book, Daniel Moerman’s Meaning, Medicine, and the Placebo Effect (2002), and its secondhand account of studies published twenty, thirty, even forty years ago
