Informal Thoughts on Irving Kirsch’s The Emperor’s New Drugs

By Way of Heads Up

In this page I will be taking a brief look at Psychologist Irving Kirch’s 2009 book, The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth. The topic is of course very controversial, and perhaps even personal for you. Given this day and age, it is very likely that you or a close friend is taking antidepressants. If you are yourself taking them, then it is only natural for you to read the smaller font of the book’s title — Exploding the Antidepressant Myth, and come away with the implicit sensation that Kirch is out to “get you.” But the point of the book is not to invalidate your potentially positive experience with antidepressents, and it is not at all to invalidate the authenticity of your depression. The point is a bit more nuanced, and I hope that it will instill in you, as it instilled in me, a feeling of empathy and understanding towards modern as well as traditional forms of combating depression.

Let me be up front and say that I have a [ball in the game idiom]. I have for a while felt as though the prevailing cultural perception of Science as “the truth” lends itself to a delusional degree of confidence in the capacity of one’s own rationality — that every buzzfeed article beginning with the words “Scientists say” confirms in us the assumption that “good-living” is “rational-living,” indeed, that positive life outcomes can be measured empirically (i.e., through diagnostics of physical or mental health), and that the further one distances oneself from the “Unscientific” albeit perhaps comforting delusions of bygone eras (the most central among these being God) the better chance one has of living a life that is at once healthy and authentic.

Do you think that I am secretly trying to convert you to my religion? I can assure you that this is not the case. I was raised in a secular household by parents who had themselves grown-up belonging to two different faiths. In the course of my life, I have explored faith somewhat academically but never with any sort of confessional belief in God. Furthermore, I am someone who is pursuing a career in Science, and therefore believes rather personally in the power of Science. Without data-driven approaches, and without especially the environment of cantankerous debate that Scientific communities are so famous (or rather infamous) for, I do not think that we human-beings have come to learn so much about the world and ourselves over the past three-hundred. In the domain of human health, the benefits would seem to be undeniable.

and the world we inhabit, and that without it , , esits emphasis on data-driven in indispensable to our understanding of ourselves and the world. and I am myself not religious. So if you are yourself one of those Athiests who “believes” in Science, then you may rest assured that my larger point will not at all be to turn you onto any specific religion or belief-system. Indeed, what I have most interesting in Science are specifically Scientific theories of consciousness

trust me when I say that there was not simplistic motive behind this truth (think of every news article beginning with the words “Scientists say XYZ”).