Cosmetic Pharmacology
Antidepressants Used for Cosmetic Purposes
Antidepressants are not only used frequently and for a wide variety of problems, but they are also advertised to work to change a person's personality, to turn a shy, downcast person into an outgoing social butterfly through means of chemicals. This phenomenon was displayed on the cover of Newsweek on February 7, 1994:
How Science Will Let You Change Your
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Is it ok for us to take drugs to change our personalities? Not only are antidepressants used for their initial purpose, to make people feel better, but they are also being used to fix innate personality traits within a person.
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The term cosmetic psychopharmacology was coined by Dr. Peter Kramer in his now infamous book Listening to Prozac. The term refers to the advent of drugs that work to alter personalities whose appearance could do with a little "cosmetic" help. Dr. Kramer describes how, with the new antidepressant craze, "fairly healthy people are not so much cured of illness as transformed", because traits that have always been considered endearing and commonplace are slowly becoming pitied and corrected (Kramer, 1997).
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While changes in personality naturally occur slowly over time, people on Prozac and other antidepressants appear to have their personalities changed almost instantly (Kramer, 1997). With more and more research being done everyday, we are getting closer and closer to discovering drugs that can target individual personality traits in completely normal people who do not even show depressive symptoms. With this kind of technology, what we are ultimately saying is that in our culture there is only one ideal personality style, and that everyone should accomodate to that style in order to become socially attractive.
The antidepressant craze is producing a role reversal of the standard medical model: Instead of defining the illness and then providing medication, we are now allowing the medication to define the illness. In the past decade, we have been heading in a direction towards defining depression as how it responds to medication, by prescribing antidepressants to everyone and concluding that there must be something wrong with them if they respond. The quickness with which we jump to alter people's personalities at the slightest nudge has long-term implications for the social and interactive appeal of our culture.
