LISTENING TO EXISTENTIAL ANGST: Listening to Prozac author Peter Kramer has always been mystified, and more than a little irritated, by a question that routinely comes up in his public appearances: What if antidepressants had been around in Edgar Alan Poe's (or Nietzsche's, or Kierkegaard's, or [insert tortured artist here]'s) day? Which, he says, is every bit as silly as asking, what if penicillin had been around when Isak Dinesen contracted syphilis?

But is it? Are his questioners really just romanticizing depression, as he suggests? Or are they understandably concerned about a widely-prescribed class of psychoactive pharmaceuticals whose effectiveness is still judged almost entirely on the basis of (largely self-reported) symptomology, rather than a full understanding of the organic mechanisms at work? If I had to bet, I'd say that there's at least a little of the latter at the root of the question. And until Dr. Kramer and his colleagues can tell us precisely how these drugs cure the disease of depression (in the same way that they can explain, say, the interaction of penicillin and syphilis), the query that the good doctor finds so, well, depressing, isn’t going to go away. Nor should it. [Via Arts and Letters Daily.]