Drug Milltown

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The first blockbuster psychopharmaceutical was in the 1950s. It was a drug that now really doesn't exist at least under this trade name called Milltown on Reprova Mate. The image that they had in Milltown specifically, we're sort of familiar with mother's little helper and perhaps Valium in the 1970s. This is as American as it gets to make us productive as possible, right, in sort of business settings.

When psychiatrist Marco Ramos of Yale University prescribes antidepressants to patients in distress and they ask him how they work, Ramos admits: We don't really know. And too often, they don't work at all. Despite decades of brain research and billions of dollars spent, psychiatry has made little progress in understanding mental illness. Listen as Ramos explains to EconTalk's Russ Roberts how the myth of the biological basis for mental illness began, why it stubbornly persists, and why honesty about what we know and don't know is the best policy.