Reviews; October 2007; Scientific American Magazine; by Michelle Press; 1 Page(s)

Would Henry David Thoreau and Emily Dickinson be given drugs today? In the 1980s a small group of leading psychiatrists revised the profession's diagnostic manual, called the DSM for short, adding social anxiety disorder--aka shyness--and dozens of other new conditions. Christopher Lane, Miller Research Professor at Northwestern University, uses previously secret documents, many from the American Psychiatric Association archives, to support his argument that these decisions were marked by carelessness, pervasive influence from the pharmaceutical industry, academic politics and personal ambition. Lane shows how drug companies seized on the newly minted disorders to sell millions of dollars' worth of psychotropic drugs. Some have dangerous side effects; some were already developed-treatments looking for a disease. The next revision of the DSM is already under way, and Lane warns that without drastic reform many more common behaviors--excessive shopping, poorly controlled anger, defiance--can become pathologies for which drugs are already on tap.

As much about the unmaking as the making of the superpower arms race, Richard Rhodes's latest book alludes in its subtitle to his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Making of the Atomic Bomb. He begins by tracing the convictions that shaped two men's determination to end the threat of nuclear annihilation. Mikhail Gorbachev, born into a peasant family in 1931, lived through Stalin's "Great Terror," when the dictator deliberately starved millions of farmers to force them onto collective farms. The destruction at Chernobyl--on the order of one-third the power of the smallest nuclear explosive--crystallized his mission. "Global nuclear war can no longer be the continuation of rational politics, as it would bring the end of all life," Gorbachev told the Politburo in 1986.