The sociologist Alain Ehrenberg writes that long-term treatment with antidepressants has become a cure for people who feel inadequate. The drugs create a “paradoxical situation, in which the medication is invested with magical powers while the pathology becomes chronic.” Helen, who stayed off Lexapro, believed there had been something phony about her sudden desire, while medicated, to be part of the world. I, too, found it foreign. But it also felt true. “It is joy to be hidden,” the British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott wrote, “but disaster not to be found.”
