I’m saying goodbye to books we won’t have room for in the beautiful wine country. (Brer Rabbit was jiving when he said, “Please don’t throw me in the briar patch,” but I sort of mean it.) Given what Israel has become, I was looking for a little mass-market paperback I once owned called “A World Without Jews” by Karl Marx. It had been compiled by someone who hated Marx and had selected writings to show that he was anti-Yid.
I couldn’t find it, but I did come across “Marx and Engels on Religion,” a trade paperback published by Shocken in 1957 with writings chosen by editors at the Foreign Languages Publishing House in Moscow. I opened it at random to an essay written by Marx in 1841 that began: “Hitherto we credited Kolnische Zeitung [The Cologne Times] with being, if not the ‘paper of Rhineland intellectuals,’ at least the Rhineland ‘Advertiser’.”
A footnote explains, “Marx here makes a pun on ‘Blatt der Intelligenz’ — newspaper of the intellectuals — and ‘Intelligenzblatt’ — Advertiser. Make of this what you will.
In a carton of Prozac-related material that I was planning to toss I came across a letter Alex Cockburn wrote to Shelley Wanger, an editor at Pantheon that you might want to run as ‘Prozac Book Pitch’ by Alexander Cockburn. I think I have the rest if it in my "system."
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Note On Prozac Books
by Alexander Cockburn
There have been some books on Prozac, none from our perspective.
Best known: ‘Listening to Prozac,’ by Peter Kramer. This book did very well in 1993, and actually stimulated sales of the drug, There is some evidence of links between Kramer and Eli Lilly, makers of Prozac and we will be looking into these further in the book. Despite some protestations of neutrality, Kramer is considered a flak for Lilly and for Prozac. Obviously his take on the subject is entirely different from our own.
Peter and Ginger Breggin's ‘Talking Back to Prozac’ was published by St. Martins earlier this year, and apparently did well on its hardback printing of some 35,000. Breggin is a controversial and in our view decent psychiatrist who provides some useful background material particularly with regard to the FDA's testing and initial approval of Prozac. His book does not deal with Lilly's extraordinary marketing campaign which will be our main focus. Our book addresses the selling of depression in a social and political context whereas Breggin's is psychologically oriented.
Elisabeth Wetzel’s ‘Prozac Nation’ is a first person account reflecting the author's ambivalence towards the drug (which she has been taking for years) and in no way overlaps with ours.
There is another in paperback by a Columbia professor called Ronald Fieve. It didn't arouse much interest and had nothing to do with our approach.
The point to be made here is: The subject of antidepressants as a response to social breakdown is not one that is going to go away. It is far bigger than the books written about Prozac thus far. Nobody has challenged the concept of clinical depression or the selling of depression as a productivity crisis for the country, which has become an increasingly important part of the drug companies' marketing strategy.
Americans are filling their Prozac prescriptions at the rate of a million a month. The sales went up 74% in the third quarter of 1994. Sales of Paxil and Zoloft went up 50% in the same period.
The media's interest in Prozac isn't going to go away either. Roughly 160 civil cases over Prozac are pending. A made for tv movie about it is in the works. The interest in Prozac is of course not confined to the US.
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Book Pitch:
Is Anybody Happy?
Prozac and the Politics of Depression
by Alexander Cockburn & Fred Gardner
Happiness was considered a political matter by the framers of the Declaration of Independence. The pursuit of it, they asserted, was an inalienable right, as important as life and liberty. But in America today, happiness is not considered a political issue. To the contrary, Americans are told that the reverse of happiness — depression — is the issue, is a crisis, and can be solved medically. Prozac has become the sanctioned metaphor for our psychic condition.
‘Is Anybody Happy?’ will investigate the corporate campaign whereby Prozac became the sanctioned solution to the nation’s spiritual ills. We will document and analyze Eli Lilly's highly successful campaign to:
• Stimulate demand by convincing the American people that there is an epidemic of “clinical depression” — a medical illness that results from a chemical imbalance in the brain.
• Convince physicians that fluoxetine hydrochloride is a safe and effective treatment for clinical depression; and encourage more frequent diagnosis of clinical depression.
• Convince the government and major employers that use of the drug to treat clinical depression will boost productivity.
• Discredit all critics by linking them to a “cult.”
• Keep the American people convinced that spreading mass misery is a matter of just so many individual cases of chemical imbalance,” correctable by drugs.
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Chapter 1: Selling Clinical Depression
Will provide an overview of the mental health industry; examine how psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry have succeeded in defining depression as a medical condition; point out the profound bias inherent in drug companies’ underwriting and directing biomedical research; and describe the function of the federal government and the psychiatric establishment in masking this bias.
As conditions of American life get more stressful, the mental health industry booms. From 1978 to 1990 the number of psychiatrists increased from 26,000 to 36,000, clinical psychologists from 15,000 to 42,000, clinical social workers from 25,000 to 90,000, and marriage and family counselors front 6,000 to 40,000. Almost half a million Americans work in psychiatric facilities. The overriding trend is from inpatient to outpatient care at clinics and private psychotherapy offices. We will analyze the power structure of the industry (in which psychiatrists remain dominant) and show how changes in the reimbursement system have encouraged overdiagnosis of mental disorders.
Psychiatrists and psychologists attempt to impose rigor on their field by means of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), the fourth edition of which was published in the spring of 1994. The definition of clinical depression — and every other mental disorder for which psychotherapists provide…
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The ‘Cult’
… on which Lilly wanted to pin all criticism of Prozac was Scientology. They provided Alex with a ton of relevant material and he wanted to credit them for having the correct line re Big Pharma and Psychiatry. I also came across this LA Times clipping about Abbie Hoffman's suicide. The Scientologists wanted to publicize the possibility that it was brought on by his use of Prozac.
“Prozac in Abbie Hoffman Death? Doylestown, Pa – Two citizens groups today asked the Bucks County coroner to reopen an investigation into the death of political activist Abbie Hoffman for signs that he was driven to suicide by a controversial anti-depressant. Hoffman had taken the drug Prozac for six weeks before he was found dead on April 12, 1989 in his Solebury Township apartment, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights and the Prozac Survivors Support Group said in a letter to the coroner. Coroner Thomas Rosko’s autopsy showed that Hoffman, a founder of the 1960s anti-war Yippie movement, died from an overdose of the sedative phenobarbital and alcohol. In their letter the groups cite a Harvard study linking Prozac to obsessive suicidal thoughts. Published in the February edition of the American Journal of Psychiatry, the study found that 3.5% of Prozac users developed suicidal thoughts that lasted up to three months after taking the drug.”
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