Dimensions
137 x 204 x 21mm
Like many people of her generation, Katherine Sharpe grew up on antidepressants. A serious panic attack in her first semester at college led to a prescription to Zoloft, a drug she would take for the next ten years. Her story is not remarkable except for its staggering ubiquity. In 2005, antidepressants surpassed blood-pressure medication as the most frequently prescribed class of drugs in the United States. That year, ten percent of the US population took an antidepressant, a figure that has been greater since.
But what disturbs Sharpe most about this trend is that antidepressants -- specifically, Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) -- are being prescribed to younger and younger patients. Children, adolescents, and teenagers are being robbed of the opportunity to grow up "as themselves," rather than as a medicated versions of those selves. And oftentimes the reasons for prescribing a drug in the first place are vague or unconvincing, resulting in young adults who are dogged by existentially-tinged doubts: "Would I have been someone else? Was I helped by this drug? Can I survive without it?"
In COMING OF AGE ON ZOLOFT, Sharpe delves deeply into her own drug experience, interviews dozens of her peers about their relationships to SSRIs, and tells the story of the societal and scientific perfect storm that led to the SSRI explosion in the 1990s. With these three threads, she weaves a remarkably thorough, nuanced, troubling, contradictory, and often hopeful portrait of her generation's prescription-drug culture.
Sharpe explores her subject in a voice driven by irrepresible intelligence and impeccable research. For the millions of young men and women struggling with the meaning of their prescription -- "Am I broken? Do I have a disease? Can I get better on my own?" -- COMING OF AGE ON ZOLOFT will be their friend and guide.
