Valium. Paxil. Prozac. Prescribed by the millions each year, these medications have been hailed as wonder drugs and vilified as numbing and addictive crutches. Where did this “blockbuster drug” phenomenon come from? What factors led to the mass acceptance of tranquilizers and antidepressants? And how has their widespread use affected American culture? David Herzberg addresses these questions by tracing the rise of psychiatric medicines, from Miltown in the 1950s to Valium in the 1970s to Prozac in the 1990s. The result is more than a story of doctors and patients. From bare-knuckled marketing campaigns to political activism by feminists and antidrug warriors, the fate of psychopharmacology has been intimately wrapped up in the broader currents of modern American history. Beginning with the emergence of a medical marketplace for psychoactive drugs in the postwar consumer culture, Herzberg traces how “happy pills” became embroiled in Cold War gender battles and the explosive politics of the “war against drugs”—and how feminists brought the two issues together in a dramatic campaign against Valium addiction in the 1970s. A final look at antidepressants shows that even the Prozac phenomenon owed as much to commerce and culture as to scientific wizardry. With a barrage of “ask your doctor about” advertisements competing for attention with shocking news of drug company malfeasance, Happy Pills is an invaluable look at how the commercialization of medicine has transformed American culture since the end of World War II.

A history of U.S. public health emergencies and how we can turn the tide. Despite enormous advances in medical science and public health education over the last century, access to health care remains a dominant issue in American life. U.S. health care is often hailed as the best in the world, yet the public health emergencies of today often echo the public health emergencies of yesterday: consider the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918–19 and COVID-19, the displacement of the Dust Bowl and the havoc of Hurricane Maria, the Reagan administration’s antipathy toward the AIDS epidemic and the lack of accountability during the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. Spanning the period from the presidency of Woodrow Wilson to that of Donald Trump, American Health Crisis illuminates how—despite the elevation of health care as a human right throughout the world—vulnerable communities in the United States continue to be victimized by structural inequalities across disparate geographies, income levels, and ethnic groups. Martin Halliwell views contemporary public health crises through the lens of historical and cultural revisionings, suturing individual events together into a narrative of calamity that has brought us to our current crisis in health politics. American Health Crisis considers the future of public health in the United States and, presenting a reinvigorated concept of health citizenship, argues that now is the moment to act for lasting change.

A revealing look at the history and legacy of the "War on Drugs" Fifty years after President Richard Nixon declared a "War on Drugs," the United States government has spent over a trillion dollars fighting a losing battle. In recent years, about 1.5 million people have been arrested annually on drug charges—most of them involving cannabis—and nearly 500,000 Americans are currently incarcerated for drug offenses. Today, as a response to the dire human and financial costs, Americans are fast losing their faith that a War on Drugs is fair, moral, or effective. In a rare multi-faceted overview of the underground drug market, featuring historical and ethnographic accounts of illegal drug production, distribution, and sales, The War on Drugs: A History examines how drug war policies contributed to the making of the carceral state, racial injustice, regulatory disasters, and a massive underground economy. At the same time, the collection explores how aggressive anti-drug policies produced a “deviant” form of globalization that offered economically marginalized people an economic life-line as players in a remunerative transnational supply and distribution network of illicit drugs. While several essays demonstrate how government enforcement of drug laws disproportionately punished marginalized suppliers and users, other essays assess how anti-drug warriors denigrated science and medical expertise by encouraging moral panics that contributed to the blanket criminalization of certain drugs. By analyzing the key issues, debates, events, and actors surrounding the War on Drugs, this timely and impressive volume provides a deeper understanding of the role these policies have played in making our current political landscape and how we can find the way forward to a more just and humane drug policy regime.

Winner of the 2018 Arthur J. Viseltear Award from the Medical Care Section of the American Public Health Association​ Children and Drug Safety traces the development, use, and marketing of drugs for children in the twentieth century, a history that sits at the interface of the state, business, health care providers, parents, and children. This book illuminates the historical dimension of a clinical and policy issue with great contemporary significance—many of the drugs administered to children today have never been tested for safety and efficacy in the pediatric population. Each chapter of Children and Drug Safety engages with major turning points in pediatric drug development; themes of children’s risk, rights, protection and the evolving context of childhood; child-rearing; and family life in ways freighted with nuances of race, class, and gender. Cynthia A. Connolly charts the numerous attempts by Congress, the Food and Drug Administration, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and leading pediatric pharmacologists, scientists, clinicians, and parents to address a situation that all found untenable. Open access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

This edited volume explores the emergence of the stress concept and its ever-changing definitions; its uses in making novel linkages between disciplines such as ecology, physiology, psychology, psychiatry, public health, urban planning, architecture, and a range of social sciences; its application in a variety of sites such as the battlefield, workplace, clinic, hospital, and home; and the emergence of techniques of stress management in a variety of different socio-cultural and scientific locations. In short, this volume explores what happened when stress entered the discourse around modernity.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of drug policy in the United States from the early 1900s through the present day, providing historical and social context through the telling of the colorful and often tragic stories of the events and individuals throughout this period. Substance Abuse in America: A Documentary and Reference Guide examines the history of U.S. drug policy chronologically, from the early 1900s through the current day, covering topics such as patent medicines, Prohibition, Reefer Madness, the psychedelic '60s, Nixon's War on Drugs, and the powerful warring Mexican drug cartels that currently threaten political instability in that country. This book provides a comprehensive overview of U.S. drug policy that will fascinate general readers and benefit those in the field of substance abuse treatment or policy. Each chapter includes an analysis of a primary source document that serves to illuminate drug policy in America at a particular point in time as well as the reasons for the waxing and waning popularity of various drugs. The author provides accurate historical context that explains perceptions about substance abuse in American history, and draws compelling parallels across different time periods to show that much of what may seem new and unique for the present generation actually has a historical precedent.

The first authoritative look at the history of the prescription itself, Prescribed is a groundbreaking book that subtly explores the politics of therapeutic authority and the relations between knowledge and practice in modern medicine.

La família Sackler és una de les més riques del món i és coneguda per haver fet donacions molt generoses a entitats i institucions de l'àmbit de les arts i les ciències. També és la responsable de produir i promocionar l'OxyContin, un opiaci venut com a analgèsic que ha provocat milers de morts i milions d'addictes als Estats Units. Patrick Radden Keefe retrata de forma implacable les tres generacions de la dinastia farmacèutica que ha causat una de les crisis sanitàries més devastadores dels últims anys, i en responsabilitza, també, tot l'entramat d'advocats, funcionaris, metges i polítics que han ajudat a perpetuar-la. L'imperi del dolor és una obra mestra que revela amb rigor i precisió la cara més fosca de l'ambició humana.

Making Mental Health: A Critical History historicises mental health by examining the concept from the ‘madness’ of the late nineteenth century to the changing ideas about its contemporary concerns and status. It argues that a critical approach to the history of psychiatry and mental health shows them to constitute a dual clinical-political project that gathered pace over the course of the twentieth century and continues to resonate in the present. Drawing on scholarship across several areas of historical inquiry as well as historical and contemporary clinical literature, the book uses a thematic approach to highlight decisive moments that demonstrate the stakes of this engagement in Anglo-American contexts. By tracing the (unfinished) history of institutions, the search for cures for psychiatric distress, the growing interest of the nation-state in mental health, the history of attempts to globalise psychiatry, the controversies over the politics of diagnostic categories that erupted in the 1960s and 1970s, and the history of theorising about the relationship between the psyche and the market, the book offers a comprehensive account of the evolution of mental health into a commonplace concern. Addressing key questions in the fields of history, medical humanities, and the social sciences, as well as in the psychiatry disciplines themselves, the book is an essential contribution to an ongoing conversation about mental distress and its meanings.

Happier? provides the first history of the origins, development, and impact of the shift in how Americans - and now many around the world - consider the human condition. This change, which came about from the fusing of beliefs and knowledge from Eastern spiritual traditions, behavioral economics, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and cognitive psychology, has been led by scholars and academic entrepreneurs, in play with forces such as neoliberalism and cultural conservatism, and a public eager for self-improvement. Ultimately, the book illuminates how positive psychology, one of the most influential academic fields of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, infused American culture with captivating promises for a happier society.