Heroes Not Zombies

Pharmakon, by Dirk Wittenborn, ( ISBN 978-0747598107), is a good read. It’s a novel which tells the story of one American family, starting with a focus on the father, a psychologist, then following the story of his youngest son. The territory of the book is the treatment of mental health, and in some ways, that reminded me of Sebastian Faulk’s “Human Traces“. However, despite the fact that both novels make you think about psychiatry as a therapy, it’s a more modern novel than Human Traces, taking a focus on drugs. You could tell that from the title I’m sure! In fact, by focusing on drugs taken to alter mental states, Wittenborn explores and entwines both “therapeutic” and “recreational” use of drugs.

Dr. William T. Friedrich wonders if it is possible to find a drug which will produce human happiness. The idea that this might be possible is prompted by two things. Firstly, he is horrified by the contemporary 1950s psychiatric treatments, finding psycho-surgery barbaric and psycho-analysis ineffective. Secondly, he comes across the use of a plant by tribes in New Guinea to alter mental states. He persuades a colleague to set up a clinical trial of this plant extract and see if they can prescribe happiness. Things, of course, don’t go according to plan, and one of the volunteers, a deeply disturbed young man called Caspar, after an initial apparently astonishingly good response to the drug, turns homicidal and sets out to kill the two researchers.

For the rest of the novel, Caspar haunts the Friedrich family. His crimes result in him being committed to secure psychiatric care for the rest of his life, and to Dr Friedrich and his wife having another child, Zach. Zach’s story leads into recreational drug use and its sorry consequences. Friedrich himself goes on to become a successful consultant to major drug companies helping them to create and market a number of anti-depressants and other psycho-active products.

As you might imagine, this is not a happy story, but it’s engaging and it also makes you think not only about psychiatry and drug companies, but also about human happiness – what is it and can it ever be achieved by using chemicals?

The drug company thread of the narrative echoed some of the themes of Popco but this is not a novel about drug companies. It’s a novel about life, mental health care, the place which drugs (prescribed and illegal) play in our society, and, ultimately, it’s a novel about families and happiness.

I found the last paragraph of the book immensely satisfying. I won’t spoil the story for you, but suffice it to say that at the beginning of the story, Friedrich wonders if its possible for a drug to produce happiness, and at the end, he’s wondering if it’s possible to find a drug which will produce tears.