Peter Kramer, “Listening to Prozac: A Psychiatist Explores Antidepressant Drugs and the Remaking of the Self,” in May, Applied Ethics, 3^rd ed., 640-652.

Kramer considers case studies and expresses some reservations about interventions with personality-altering prescription drugs. He contends that the approval given to certain personality traits in the business culture has prompted the use of some prescription drugs that enhance such valued traits. Tendencies that enhance business success are to “see crises as opportunities, to let criticism roll off their backs, make decisions easily, exude confidence, and hurry through the day with energy to spare.”

Kramer is concerned about how drugs that promote such traits may be used in a competitive society. Success in inducing certain personality traits through prozac and other personality-altering drugs could reinforce a cultural tendency to biologize personality traits. It is difficult to resist the claim that our personality is largely biologically encoded in the face of success with these drugs in restoring persons to successful functioning in the business community.

Kramer identifies as a central issue the question of personhood. Some of his patients have come to associate the expression of the traits valued by the business community, following the intake of drugs, as “being myself.” They take on as their “true identity” characteristics that enable them to be successful in the business arena.

Kramer is concerned that some traits traditionally assigned a lesser value in the business community—shyness, melancholy, lack of confidence, feelings of vulnerability—may be regarded as a form of mild illness. He expresses concern over how far medicine and society at large may go toward “permitting drug responses to shape our understanding of the authentic self.”

Kramer questions the utilitarian goal of the greatest net benefit and draws upon a notion of authenticity to question contemporary practices in medicine and psychiatry. The notion of authentic human existence finds a coherent framework in self-realization theories such as those advanced by moderate communitarians.

Kramer also implicitly calls into question the libertarian moral framework with its emphasis on business competition. He expresses concern about the self-actualization of individuals who come to associate business success with biologically encoded personality traits. Traditional (communitarian) qualities such as courage, charisma, character, and social competency would lose their central importance should successful personality traits become matters to be treated by biology and chemistry.