Will New Caution Shift Old Views?: “Since the ascendancy of the biological approach to psychiatry in the 1980’s, Americans have tended to view psychiatric illness as something that should always be treated with drugs and to believe that medication is the only intervention needed. But the real story of 20th-century psychiatry is how complex mental illness is and how difficult it is to treat.

If there is are lessons to be learned from this controversy, they are that antidepressants should not be dispensed like candy, that depression is a serious problem and treating it a serious enterprise, that therapy should always be considered as an option and that, at the least, patients who are given medication should be carefully followed by people who ask them how they feel.”

—Tanya Luhrmann, professor at the University of Chicago and the author of Of Two Minds: An Anthropologist Looks at Modern Psychiatry, in New York Times