Coming Age Zoloft PB - Paperback

by Katherine Sharpe (Author)

A compelling and troubling exploration of a generation raised on antidepressants, and a book that combines expansive interviews with substantive research-based reporting, Coming of Age on Zoloft is a vitally important and immediately engrossing study of one of America's most pressing and omnipresent issues: our growing reliance on prescription drugs. Katherine Sharpe, the former editor of Seed magazine's ScienceBlogs.com, addresses the questions that millions of young men and women are struggling with. "Where does my personality end and my prescription begin?" "Do I have a disease?" "Can I get better on my own?" Combining stout scientific acumen with first-person experience gained through her own struggle with antidepressants, Sharpe leads the reader through a complex subject, a guide towards a clearer future for all.

This blend of investigative journalism and personal memoir asks the tough questions about the Prozac generation:

• A History of Antidepressants: From the "psychopharmaceutical revolution" of the 1990s to today, discover how drugs like Zoloft and Prozac changed American culture and the conversation around mental illness.
• SSRIs and Identity: Tackles the defining question for a medicated generation--exploring what happens when you can't tell where your personality ends and your prescription begins.
• Talk Therapy vs. Medication: Through personal experience and deep research, Sharpe weighs the benefits and drawbacks of treating depression with pills versus psychotherapy.
• Living with Depression and Anxiety: Follows the author's own ten-year journey with antidepressants, from a college diagnosis to the difficult questions of life as a young adult.

Front Jacket

When Katherine Sharpe arrived at her college health center with an age-old complaint, a bad case of homesickness, she received a thoroughly modern response: a twenty-minute appointment and a prescription for Zoloft--a drug she would take for the next ten years. This outcome, once unlikely, is now alarmingly common. Twenty-five years after Prozac entered the marketplace, 10 percent of Americans over the age of six use an SSRI antidepressant.

In Coming of Age on Zoloft, Sharpe blends deeply personal writing, thoughtful interviews, and historical context to achieve an unprecedented portrait of the antidepressant generation. She explores questions of identity that arise for people who start medication before they have an adult sense of self. She asks why some individuals find a diagnosis of depression reassuring, while others are threatened by it. She presents, in young people's own words, their intimate and complicated relationships with their medication. And she weighs the cultural implications of America's biomedical approach to moods.

Back Jacket

When Katherine Sharpe arrived at her college health center with an age-old complaint, a bad case of homesickness, she received a thoroughly modern response: a twenty-minute appointment and a prescription for Zoloft--a drug she would take for the next ten years. This outcome, once unlikely, is now alarmingly common. Twenty-five years after Prozac entered the marketplace, 10 percent of Americans over the age of six use an SSRI antidepressant.

In Coming of Age on Zoloft, Sharpe blends deeply personal writing, thoughtful interviews, and historical context to achieve an unprecedented portrait of the antidepressant generation. She explores questions of identity that arise for people who start medication before they have an adult sense of self. She asks why some individuals find a diagnosis of depression reassuring, while others are threatened by it. She presents, in young people's own words, their intimate and complicated relationships with their medication. And she weighs the cultural implications of America's biomedical approach to moods.