Drugs

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I don't know if there's any to it, but my dad worked in office, job, all his life. There was a long period of time where he smoked two to three packs of cigarettes a day. He lived to 89. But still some of those years were unpleasant because of smoking. And I asked him something about why, you know, what was good about it. He said, well, it comes to be down or, you know,. It helps him. So the question I'm thinking about is the following. One out of six Americans is on some sort of psycho therapeutic drug.

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.