Historian and Harvard professor Anne Harrington recently delved into the modern history of psychiatry in the U.S. and discovered the huge role drug companies have played in determining how conditions like anxiety, depression and bipolar disorder are defined and treated.
Her latest book, Mind Fixers: Psychiatry's Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness, details how the increased marketing of drugs like Valium, and then Prozac and its chemical kin, led many people away from talk therapy – a shift that hasn’t always served patients well, Harrington says. READ EXCERPTS of her conversation with Fresh Air's Terry Gross, to learn why Harrington calls depression “the common cold of psychiatry.”
With more than 700 cases of measles in the U.S. in 2019, health officials want everyone who needs the combo measles/mumps/rubella vaccine to get it. And – surprise! – that might include you, even if you’re an adult and were immunized against measles as a child. A broad swath of people born before the mid-1960s should get a booster, the CDC says, along with younger people unsure of their immunization status – especially if you’re planning to get pregnant.
OK, so maybe she shouldn’t have been wearing sandals on the trail at dusk. But nobody expected a $142,938 bill for the antivenin and other medical care that saved 9-year-old Oakley Yoder’s life last summer, after she was bitten by what was probably a startled copperhead.
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