clipped from: www.nytimes.com In his new book, Peter D. Kramer tells a story about traveling to promote the best-known of his earlier books, "Listening to Prozac," and regularly encountering the same kind of wiseguy in lecture audiences. Wherever he went, somebody would ask him whether the world would be shorter on Impressionist masterpieces if Prozac had been prescribed for Vincent van Gogh.
Sunflowers and starry nights aside, this anecdote is revealing. It conveys both the facts that "Listening to Prozac" made a mental health celebrity out of Dr. Kramer (who is a clinical professor of psychiatry at Brown University) and that the book's success left him uneasy. He became a target, not only of New Yorker cartoons (one of which featured a Prozac-enhanced Edgar Allan Poe being nice to a raven) but of condescension from his professional peers. He found out that there was no intellectual advantage to be gained from pointing the way to sunnier moods.
