Happy Pills in America

[Avoids] heated debates between advocates of psychotropic medication such as Peter Kramer and vocal critics such as Peter Breggin and David Healy. Instead, Herzberg shows us how the meanings attached to such drugs evolved from a complex interplay of shifting interests, including those of marketers, patients and doctors. Although the story is a complicated one, it is highly readable and Herzberg tells it using plain, non-technical language.

The book admirably achieves its main aim: describing the reception of tranquilizers in the popular imagination of postwar America. It also draws attention to the important issue of happiness as an increasingly medicalized commodity in that context.

A brilliant book, rich and mind-bending... Unlike most others on the subject, Happy Pills seeks not to condemn or celebrate but to understand. I find it hard not to praise it too much, not to become a marketing tool urging its wider distribution and intellectual consumption.

Herzberg eloquently guides us through the world of happy pills in post–World War II America... Happy Pills is an engaging, insightful, and well-researched book that makes a strong contribution to the historical and social study of science.

Herzberg is a a social historian and meticulous auditor of the progress of psychotropic medication in the USA... On the one hand these drugs offer escape from the stresses and strains of socio-economic relations; on the other hand they are a direct product of those relations.

Truly a dizzying array of data on the history of the science, commerce, marketing, medicine, psychiatry and psychology, all aspects of the history of the pills, is a major achievement... Herzberg's book, exemplifying history of medicine as a thoroughly interdisciplinary field, is important and timely.

An incisive cultural history that documents the transformation of these medications into 'happy pills' for the middle class.

Welcome and informative... a kind of protest against the tendency to assume that the issues surrounding psychiatric drug use can be reduced to scientific or technological factors.

This well-crafted book combines historical perspectives with the enduring issues of consumerism, patients' rights, ethical principles, and the role of pharmaceutical companies in marketing medicines.

Highlights important implications of the cultural embrace of lifestyle drugs for dealing with everyday problems of living.

A timely book, persuasive and well documented.

This extremely well-written and well-researched book demands, and deserves, a wide audience.

Written with verve, it offers myriad ways to understand the complexity and range of its subject. Not only does it illuminate American drug cultures; it also demonstrates the rich interplay of invention, marketing, advertising, expertise, regulation, medical practice, and consumption.

An excellent starting point from which to explore many changes in post-war American psychiatry, changes that have affected the way in which we conceptualize, analyse and treat mental illness.

[An] intriguing book.

Happy Pills provides readers, especially college-level students, with an excellent historical introduction to the subject of mood-altering prescription drugs as used in the United States in the post-World War II era. Herzberg's clear and readable prose masks in part the depth of his understanding and analysis of the topic. In addition to its classroom potential, this is a serious book with valuable insights for scholars in the field.

Herzberg steers a very steady course through dangerous waters. Happy Pills is a beautiful read, its thesis engaging, and its style well-paced and fresh. Its non-technical language and focus on the interaction between drugs and the broader culture should appeal to many readers regardless of specialization.

Happy Pills in America offers an extraordinary analysis of how tranquilizers and antidepressants were as much a part of the post-World War II consumer society as suburban living and the car culture. Whether Americans bought or sold, advertised or prescribed, embraced or condemned these feel-good pills, they participated in commodifying the 'good life.'