A review by pilesandpiles
Coming of Age on Zoloft: How Antidepressants Cheered Us Up, Let Us Down, and Changed Who We Are by Katherine Sharpe

2.0

I'm really grumpy that I took the time to read this entire book. The premise is that the author took antidepressants on and off for about 10 years, beginning in college, and she wants to explore what's lost or gained when one comes into adulthood on medication. This should obviously just have been an essay, but instead she stretches it out through interviews with people with very similar backgrounds and life experiences as herself to make very predictable points that she clearly already had in mind. There's a brief nod to the possible relationship between capitalism and the upward trend in anxiety in young Americans, and a critical perspective on big pharma's role in all this, but otherwise no systemic analysis or even an acknowledgment that "coming of age" can't totally be universalized.