I'm wondering if the reduction in smoking, which was a palliative effect for some of the stress we're talking about, encourage the demand for some of these alternatives. And I think your contention that we should see a history of cigarette use as a way for people to deal with the anxiety and stress of their everyday life is also part of the same history right? Yeah. In my history of drugs class I talk about how the same biochemical substance often crosses this line back and forth and back and forth to back. So we need to see the boundary between the sort of medicalized market and this recreational drug market as extremely porous. But pharmaceutical companies realize what is that if they can medicalize
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.