TV Reviews : ‘Happy Valley’: Balanced View of Prozac Controversy

Prozac may help release serotonin into the brain’s chemistry, triggering a pleasing effect. But the drug is having a different kind of social effect, which the BBC-”Frontline” co-production, “Welcome to Happy Valley,” traces with a meticulously balanced eye.

There are those, led by Dr. Jim Goodwin, a clinical psychologist in Wenatchee, Wash., who claim that Prozac saved their lives. Without it, these patients insist, they are depressed to an almost comatose state or, alternately, to a suicidal one.

Curiously, there are those critics who claim that Prozac can cause suicide--and worse. Bill Forsythe tells a meeting of the Prozac Survivors’ Support Group how his Prozac-hooked father stabbed his mother 15 times, then killed himself.

The Prozac critics are stirred by psychiatrist Peter Breggin’s powerful condemnation of the drug’s manufacturer, Eli Lilly, as “selling the idea of drugs and depression to America.” They are also riled by Goodwin’s seeming hunger for promoting the drug on national talk shows and his having Prozac prescribed for all of his patients.

The allure of the quick fix out of depression, though, may be an illusion. Some, like writer Susanna Kayson, insist from personal experience that there is no substitute for the one-on-one human dialogue of traditional therapy. Temple University researcher Dr. Lauren Alloy has found in studies that mildly depressed people may be more realistic about their lives than those with rosy outlooks, and thus, healthier.

But the mystery of Prozac, how it seemingly can alter one’s attitude, is one of many about the brain, and the debate here may be no more than the reflection of science’s still tenuous grasp of the brain’s workings. “Listening to Prozac” author Peter Kramer strikes the best balance here, saying that Prozac works for some, fails for others, but must be part of a doctor’s “bag of tricks” in fighting mental illness.

* “Welcome to Happy Valley” airs at 9 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28.