The Rise and Fall of the Age of Psychopharmacology

John M (Mickey") Nardo, in his retirement, practiced psychiatry in a volunteer clinic in the Appalachian hills of Georgia. "I worked in the clinics today," he wrote in 2012. "In the morning, I saw adults - a lot of them. I had three patients where the central issue was unrecognized anti-depressant withdrawal syndromes." I had three patients who'd been told they were 'bipolar' (who weren't)." But the high point of the day came that afternoon. His last patient was an adult woman "with persistent PTSD from a terrible event eight years ago that involved the death of her son. The tension of undoing bad diagnoses and bad treatments all day just disappeared as I talked to this woman about her illness. I felt like a doctor instead of someone putting out brush fires, a case-worker in a social agency, or a med-check doctor"--