NONFICTION - Sept. 25, 1994

TALKING BACK TO PROZAC: What Doctors Aren’t Telling You About Today’s Most Controversial Drug by Peter R. Breggin M.D. and Ginger Ross Breggin (St. Martin’s: $19.95; 273 pp.). Prozac, writes Dr. Peter Breggin, “constitutes a toxic interference into the brain. If it feels good, it means that the individual prefers impaired brain function to normal brain function.” Passages like that have made Breggin, author of the best-selling “Toxic Psychiatry” and other books, unpopular in the pharmaceutical industry, and “Talking Back to Prozac” won’t make him any new friends in the field . . . though it does vindicate many patients who have had unpleasant experiences with psychiatric medication. Breggin takes aim at a number of targets in this volume, a major mark being the Federal Drug Administration, which he criticizes convincingly for over-reliance (during the drug-testing process) on manufacturer-sponsored, manufacturer-manipulated studies, and he even catches an FDA division head saying that drug labeling shouldn’t “cause injury to industry, as much as it should not cause injury to patients or physicians.” Breggin makes clear that Prozac isn’t the wonder drug portrayed in books such as Peter Kramer’s “Listening to Prozac,” to which “Talking Back to Prozac” is an obvious reply; the drug’s side effects range from feelings of anxiety and grandiosity to insomnia, psychosis and further depression, and since its introduction in 1988 has produced 28,000 FDA-filed adverse-reaction reports--more, apparently, than for any other drug tracked by the agency. Breggin’s views can be extreme--at one point he calls Prozac not merely “anti-empathic,” a pharmacologically accurate characterization, but “anti-life”--yet there’s unquestionably a great deal of truth in what he writes. Let the pill-swallower beware.