About this item
Public perceptions of mental health issues have changed dramatically over the last fifteen years, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the rampant overmedication of ordinary Americans. In 2006, 227 million antidepressant prescriptions were dispensed in the United States, more than any other class of medication; in that same year, the United States accounted for 66 percent of the global antidepressant market. In Comfortably Numb, Charles Barber provides a much-needed context for this disturbing phenomenon.Barber explores the ways in which pharmaceutical companies first create the need for a drug and then rush to fill it, and he reveals that the increasing pressure Americans are under to medicate themselves (direct-to-consumer advertising, fewer nondrug therapeutic options, the promise of the quick fix, the blurring of distinction between mental illness and everyday problems).
About the Author
Charles Barber is the award-winning author of Citizen Outlaw: One Man's Journey from Gang Leader to Peacekeeper, Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry is Medicating a Nation, and Songs from the Black Chair: A Memoir of Mental Interiors. Citizen Outlaw was published in 2019 and was featured on The Today Show, The New York Times, and C-SPAN's Book TV. Charlie is a Writer in Residence at Wesleyan University, a Lecturer in Psychiatry at Yale, and Director of The Connection Institute, a criminal justice research institute. Before becoming an author he worked for many years in shelters for the homeless in New York City.
