Blue Dreams arrives in the thick of a debate about the pharmaceutical approach to mental health, and synthesizes forceful critiques from Gary Greenberg, Irving Kirsch and Robert Whitaker, among others. Slater is pithy, readable and generally fair, although I wish she had engaged more thoroughly with the defense of antidepressants ... The real strength of this book comes from Slater’s very particular position. She is patient and psychologist, part of the first wave of people who were prescribed Prozac in the 1980s. She describes how, in the years since, her mind has been saved and her body destroyed ... Blue Dreams, like all good histories of medicine, reveals healing to be art as much as science. Slater doesn’t demonize the imperfect remedies of the past or present — even as she describes their costs with blunt severity. And, improbably perhaps, she ends on a note of hope, calling these early efforts to address mental illness 'the first golden era.'
The story of Slater’s attempts to get and stay well weaves throughout Blue Dreams: The Science and the Story of the Drugs That Changed Our Minds and provides some of the book’s most poignant and lyrical writing. Just as important, her experience makes her a convincing travel guide into the history, creation and future of psychotropics. She is, understandably, not an uncritical cheerleader. But she resists the facile role of hard-charging prosecutor. And no wonder, really, given that the drugs have allowed her to have two children, write nine books, marry (and divorce) and hold dear friendships ... the journey begins to feel too wide-ranging and, occasionally, too thin on details about what we’re passing along the way. Still, several of the up-and-coming treatments — many of them not new at all — shift our focus from unmediated pill popping. Among them are placebos, which don’t work for all patients and have no effect on those with Alzheimer’s. But, as Slater rightly notes, numerous studies show their amazing potency, which remains too untapped by a psychiatry field still enthralled with drugs.
Various facts and stories in Blue Dreams feel familiar — the hit-and-miss development of antipsychotics, MAOIs, and SSRIs; the cynical machinations of drug companies and the routine compromises of psychiatrists — yet the result is a vivid and thought-provoking synthesis. Some of the book’s most striking insights come when Slater, rejecting mainstream psychiatry’s Whiggish claims about increasingly precise diagnoses and constant drug innovation, inverts them to reveal a different form of optimism: older treatments that have fallen out of fashion, often because they’re harder to patent or to make a profit from, still offer promising avenues for exploration ... If Slater has any discernible bias, it’s in favor of human connection, of relationship, despite the messy and unpleasant side effects — the dangerous power imbalances — that this, too, can bring.
In her informative and detailed new book, Blue Dreams, Lauren Slater traces the meandering, mercurial history of psychiatric drug discovery, from Thorazine to deep brain stimulation, with a couple of forays into psychedelics ... The most moving and ultimately most compelling parts of Blue Dreams are those where Slater recounts her harrowing history of drug treatment for bipolar illness ... In details both lyrical and crushingly painful, Slater describes her lifelong struggle with what Winston Churchill called the black dog of depression ... Where the book occasionally stumbles is in Slater’s description — perhaps more like wishful thinking — of advances in the physiological understanding of mental illness ... At its best, Blue Dreams is a raw and honest memoir, and frankly one of the few that shows the truly dark side of medication — even as that medication saves lives.
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 ... Intriguing and instructive.
Mixing 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
In this ambitious undertaking, psychologist Slater (Playing House: Notes of a Reluctant Mother, 2013, etc.) applies vigorous research and intimate reflection to the issues involved with treating mental suffering ... A highly compelling, only occasionally overstated assessment of the role of psychotropic drugs in the treatment of mental health issues.
