ORIGINAL PAPER Psychotropic Drug Use: Between Healing and Enhancing the Mind Toine Pieters & Stephen Snelders Received: 12 September 2008 / Revised: 13 January 2009 / Accepted: 16 January 2009 / Published online: 11 February 2009 # Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2009 Abstract The making and taking of psychotropic drugs, whether on medical prescription or as self- medication, whether marketed by pharmaceutical companies or clamoured for by an anxious popula- tion, has been an integral part of the twentieth century. In this modern era of speed, uncertainty, pleasure and anguish the boundaries between healing and enhancing the mind by chemical means have been redefined. Long before Prozac would become a household name for an ‘emotional aspirin’ did consumers embrace the idea and practice of taking psychotropics not only to treat mental illness but also to make them feel better about living in a modern world. The Freudian promise that each individual can remake him- or herself in the pursuit of health and happiness was helpful in promoting and legitimizing the idea and practice of seeking wellness on prescription. We will argue that the modern consumer-driven political culture of medi- cine will continue to transverse the boundaries of therapy and enhancement of the mind into the largely unexplored territories of human cognition and behaviour. However exciting, this endeavour will come at the cost of further widening the problem of iatrogenic addiction in the age of happiness pills as ‘botox’ for the mind. Keywords History . Psychotropics . Enhancement . Cycle . Cosmetic . Addiction . Psychopharmacology Introduction In his bestselling 2001 novel The Corrections the American author Jonathan Franzen concocts a futur- istic story about the arrival of a new generation of personality optimizers. “The action is effectively instantaneous. That’ s the glory of it…compared with up to 4 weeks for some of the dinosaurs they are still using…Go on Zoloft today and you’re lucky to feel better a week from Friday” [1]. Despite still rising consumption figures of Zoloft- and Prozac-like selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors the heydays of what has been labelled the antidepres- sant era are over. 1 From the turn of the century the SSRI’ s have gradually passed in American, British and Dutch public perceptions from remarkably safe and effective medicines to allegedly dangerous and addictive drugs. In a similar fashion as Valium and Librium the SSRI’ s have been associated with an epidemic of iatrogenic addiction. This rather dramatic re-evaluation of what in the 1990s still counted as wonder drugs for the mind coincides with most of these drugs having run out of their patents [2–8]. Neuroethics (2009) 2:63–73 DOI 10.1007/s12152-009-9033-0 T. Pieters (*) : S. Snelders Department of Metamedica, VU medical centre, P.O. Box 7057, 1007 MB Amsterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: a.pieters@vumc.nl T. Pieters Division or Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacotherapy, University of Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands 1 World wide it concerns a market of more than 25 billion $ (8 % of the total global therapeutic drug market) with average yearly growth figures of about 10%; IMS Health 2008.