Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Happy Pills in America
Happy Pills in America
Happy Pills in America
HSTY 243
10/29/17
Happy Pills
In his book Happy Pills in America, David Herzberg provides a comprehensive history of
pharmaceuticals and emphasizes the social, cultural, and commercial influences which guide
their production and stigma rather than the biochemistry of the substances themselves.
According to the author, Americans are coming to expect happiness as another component of
the American Dream alongside other, more typical, middle class advantages. This is a
compelling argument, but Herzberg misses an opportunity to explore other relevant nuances of
current discourse, such as the reasons for drug abuse and the motivations of the
pharmaceutical industry.
One of the lasting difficulties of addressing depression, anxiety, and other mental
criteria of a disease or illness. This is easy to determine in something like an infectious disease,
where the etiology and symptomology are consistent and identifiable. However, in mental
illness, these aspects vary widely between individuals and across cultures, making it difficult to
distinguish major depressive disorder or generalized anxiety disorder from temporary stress
and sadness which occurs as a normal part of life. Because of the blurred lines between healthy
and ill, it falls to physicians to provide proper diagnoses and supply or restrict access to
medication when necessary; antianxiety drugs which are often abused can only be obtained
with a prescription, after all. The problem is when physicians, who are still human and fallible,
succumb to patient requests, intense advertising campaigns, and other such pressures to
American society which is driven by the search for happiness. Herzberg summarizes this driving
force well when he says, happiness itself came to be part of a new psychological standard of
living. Along this line, the author fails to expand on the differences between abusing drugs to
ameliorate negative emotions and abusing drugs to get high, which medications are being
used for which purpose, and the innate biochemical properties of different medications which
Additionally, although there are definite flaws and corporate motivations behind the
production and marketing of drugs, Herzberg is at times overly critical of the medical and
pharmaceutical industry. Many physicians have not been persuaded by the aforementioned
influences to overprescribe, many drugs are a step forward in the advancement of medical
technology and actually help the patients who use them, and pharmaceutical companies do
have to create effective products in order to promote business for themselves (advertising is
not enough; people will stop buying their drugs if they do not actually work). The author tries to
address the drug epidemic by arguing for universal access to good medical care as a
reasonable alternative to investing in more drug wars. While this is a wonderful ideal, this is
not the current reality of the world, and is not a means to an end.
I would like to leave off on a note regarding the future discourse surrounding the
treatment of mental illness. In chapter 5, Herzberg discusses the transition that took place in
the 1980s from the age of anxiety to the age of depression and how this influenced the
creation of new antidepressants and their cultural stigma. In the current day and age, it seems
forward by the pressures of modern society (incredibly fast technological and cultural growth,
as well as our current state of political turmoil). It would be wise to keep an eye on these
developments moving forward, and plan for the next hurdle in addressing the mental health
crisis in America.