Perhaps more than any prescription medication in history, Prozac has had a profound impact, not only on the patients who have taken it, but on the very practice of psychiatry, and on popular conceptions of mood and personality as well. Within three years of its release in 1987, Prozac (fluoxetine hydrochloride) had become the drug most prescribed by psychiatrists in the United States; by 1994 it was the second-best-selling drug of any kind in the world, with a reported one billion prescriptions written per month. In A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac, Edward Shorter describes Prozac as the household word of the 1990s; in 1994, Newsweek proclaimed that Prozac had attained the familiarity of Kleenex and the social status of springwater. The drug has been the subject of numerous television programs, magazine articles, and psychology and self-help books. Much more than a...