Advanced nations are now blase about mood-altering drugs like Prozac, Zoloft and Ritalin. Much has been written about their therapeutic merits. But just as much space has been devoted to competing predictions concerning the psychological quick-fix trend. Francis Fukuyama, author of The End of History, suspects they will lead to a futuristic nightmare along the lines of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, in which citizens are lulled into mindless social compliance. In Listening to Prozac, Peter Kramer frets over 'cosmetic pharmacology', by which he means the consumption of drugs to avoid a perfectly normal range of mood swings. The fear is that mood-altering medication simply makes our psychological comfort too easily won. Their very effectiveness, says Fukuyama, makes people less inclined to question or resist their use than they would other methods used to manufacture our psychological adjustment, like therapy or jail. Societies have always locked away in lunatic asylums or prisons the people who stray too far beyond the centre of the behavioural bell-curve. These days, 'abnormality' has reached scientific status, as laid out in the venerated Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association. It articulates just what constitutes abnormal levels of lethargic pessimism, precisely how much anxiety requires treatment; or exactly when careful attention to detail stops being a quirk and starts being a worrying mental disorder. The manual is not created in a social vacuum; its parameters are still a matter of collective will. It is at the mercy of prevailing social demands, including economic and political ones, just as shared notions of normality and abnormality always have been. What worries the cultural analysts is that if people's mood regulation comes to depend on drugs more than on hard-won strength of character, they will become lax in their collective volition and dangerously malleable. Society's soul will wither away and along with it the emotional texture and depth essential to the best in human experience. Take the notion of a 'normal' child. If enough parents and teachers complain that Tommy will not sit still in class, his behaviour becomes problematic and needs to be remedied. At one time, his misplaced liveliness would have been beaten out of him. Later, a less-direct intervention involving some form of counselling might have been attempted. These days, Tommy is likely to be diagnosed with attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder and dosed with Ritalin to calm him. But does he really have a disease or is his 'syndrome' only an excuse to use biotechnology to make his moods better fit the school system, one which is poorly suited to healthy young boys? Traditional forms of social support, such as still exist in Hong Kong, have eroded, forcing individuals increasingly to turn to strangers for help. This has distanced people from each other; mood-manipulating drugs are distancing them from their own emotions. Drugs like Prozac unashamedly treat symptoms and not underlying problems, short-circuiting the emotional ups and downs people require to cope with and fully experience life. But they can kick-start a deeper treatment when a patient is otherwise too depressed to get out of bed, and can offer hope to psychologically fossilised psychotherapy clients, saving them years of heartbreak. We all learn to regulate our moods using the means our particular society allows. I am doing so at this very moment with a carefully calibrated dose of sugar and caffeine. Biotechnology just makes our choices that little bit harder. Jean Nicol is a psychologist specialising in issues of cultural identity and change in an era of globalisation
