(9.30) Dr. Peter Kramer — author of “Listening to Prozac” and a member of the Brown Medical School faculty — will discuss his new book “Ordinarily Well” this Friday as part of the Providence Athenaeum Salon Series. Book sale and signing will follow.
A practicing doctor who trained as a psychotherapist and worked with pioneers in psychopharmacology, Peter Kramer combines his patients’ stories with a history of drug research, critiquing the growth of skepticism toward antidepressants and showing how industry-sponsored research findings can be skewed toward desired conclusions.
Updating his prior writing about the nature of depression as a destructive illness and the effect of antidepressants on traits like low self-worth, Kramer shows how antidepressants act in practice: less often as miracle cures than as useful tools for helping troubled people achieve an underrated goal – becoming ordinarily well.
Reception 5pm, Program 5:30pm to 7pm, Friday, September 30, Providence Athenaeum, 251 Benefit Street, (directions)