Do antidepressants work, or are they glorified dummy pills? How can we tell? In Ordinarily Well , the celebrated psychiatrist and author Peter D. Kramer examines the growing controversy about the popular medications. A practicing doctor who trained as a psychotherapist and worked with pioneers in psychopharmacology, Kramer combines moving accounts of his patients’ dilemmas with an eye-opening history of drug research to cast antidepressants in a new light. Kramer homes in on the moment of clinical decision making: Prescribe or not? What evidence should doctors bring to bear? Using the wide range of reference that readers have come to expect in his books, he traces and critiques the growth of skepticism toward antidepressants. He examines industry-sponsored research, highlighting its shortcomings. He unpacks the “inside baseball” of psychiatry―statistics―and shows how findings can be skewed toward desired conclusions. Kramer never loses sight of patients. He writes with empathy about his clinical encounters over decades as he weighed treatments, analyzed trial results, and observed medications’ influence on his patients’ symptoms, behavior, careers, families, and quality of life. He updates his prior writing about the nature of depression as a destructive illness and the effect of antidepressants on traits like low self-worth. Crucially, he shows how antidepressants act in practice: less often as miracle cures than as useful, and welcome, tools for helping troubled people achieve an underrated goal―becoming ordinarily well. A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice One of the Top 10 Health and Medicine Books of 2016, Booklist "Dr. Kramer, who has written so well about the curse of melancholia . . . has done something very valuable: He has waded into the contentious debate about the efficacy of antidepressants . . . [Kramer] has done some much-needed synthesizing and debunking . . . his dissections of the most incendiary studies are careful, and his conclusions ― that they overestimate placebo effects and underestimate the potency of antidepressants ― will invite a reckoning of some kind . . . his 'interludes' describing his own experience treating patients . . . are beautiful, philosophical, ambivalent." ―Jennifer Senior, The New York Times " Ordinarily Well is an ambitious, persuasive, and important book . . . [Kramer] doesn’t just make a case for antidepressants.He makes a case for psychiatry itself as a humanistic science . . . Kramer is an excellent guide as he subjects evidence-based purism . . . to the scrutiny he believes it needs . . . Kramer also works in a courteous fashion, respectful of his opponents and his readers, in whose patience and capacity for reason he places great faith." ― Jonathan Rosen, The Atlantic "Careful and measured and fair . . . Kramer evinces such humility that no one could accuse him of being a promedication ideologue . . . Kramer is out to win the 'antidepressant wars' in favor of the antidepressants. Is he right? . . . in my judgment he is . . . You will most likely come away convinced by his argument for the efficacy of antidepressants ― and moved by his humane concern for his patients, and for the needless suffering of unmedicated patients around the world." ― Scott Stossel, The New York Times Book Review "Offers a carefully argued and convincing case that antidepressants not only work but also are an essential tool in the treatment of depression . . . Anybody who wants to hear what Prozac has to say will be interested in this book." ―Ann Levin, The Associated Press "Kramer reaches into his own practice and into the scientific literature ― amply documented here ― to show that the charge of ineffectiveness is false. Antidepressants, he says, have given many patients back their lives, and some of these anecdotes are quite moving . . . [Kramer] comes across as modest and self-deprecatory, and giants such as Gerald Klerman, the onetime dean of American psychiatry, spring to life in these pages." ―Edward Shorter, The Washington Post "[ Ordinarily Well ] seeks to restore public confidence in antidepressants through a combination of reporting, research analysis and [Kramer's] own experience with patients . . . it is certainly an important [read] for those who seek help for depression and the providers who treat them." ― Damon Tweedy, Chicago Tribune "Peter D. Kramer provides a forceful rejoinder to this growing tide of skepticism [toward antidepressants]. Kramer has been a prominent voice on matters of mental health for some time . . . His new book takes a unique approach: though at times passionate and personal, it is mostly a detailed excavation of the thorny landscape of the empirical evidence for antidepressant medications." ―Adam Gaffney, The New Republic "[ Ordinarily Well ] sheds new light on this controversial matter . . . After more than 20 years [since Listening To Prozac ], Kramer wants to address properly what he thinks is a potentiall