Fitful ‘Blue Dreams’: A vivid wake-up call
When we meet Lauren Slater at the beginning of her ambitious new book, Blue Dreams: The Science and the Story of Drugs That Changed Our Minds (Little, Brown, 399 pp., ★★★☆), her life is a mess.
The psychologist’s marriage has dissolved; her kidneys are failing and so is her memory. “At fifty-four years old,” she writes, “my body is in the shape of an octogenarian with issues.”
Adversity breeds introspection, however, and she uses the turmoil as the launching point for a deep dive into her own remarkable battles with mental illness. Is it worth the bumpy ride?
We begin, as many memoirs do, with scenes from a difficult childhood: Slater’s mother was abusive, and by age 10 our narrator finds herself in psychotherapy. The “revolving-door mental patient” is hospitalized five times from ages 13 to 24, for bipolar disorder as well as an eating disorder, and she has spent the better part of adulthood popping an array of mood-altering pills.
She credits Prozac with rescuing her from decades of mental instability and says the antidepressant gave her the ability to work and love and care for her two children. (Twenty years ago, Slater caused a sensation with her memoir Prozac Diary.)
Slater has a doctorate in psychology and understands neuroscience in far greater detail than the average patient. That allows her to bounce between firstperson narrative and historical survey, with middling results. We review seminal moments in drug discovery, but those tales have been told in greater depth elsewhere. I found myself wanting less of those stories and more of hers.
Slater’s depictions of madness are terrifying and fascinating — she vividly details her own mental breakdown with bracing candor — and she brings something new to a well-worn genre. We learn of the time she stayed up all night compulsively polishing rocks she believed were precious gems (they weren’t) before tumbling into depression. “It was like having the turf pulled out from under me; a whisk and a whoa and all of a sudden, in one terrible second, I recognized that I was a forty-something female standing amid stones that were scattered everywhere.”
In the depths of despair, she has a recurring thought: The sun will never set. It will burn on and on, depriving us of darkness and the cold, drenching the world in hysterical white light. An image of the author staring powerlessly at the midday sky, quietly begging for a reprieve from suffering, is something I haven’t been able to shake.
In the course of any given day at the hospital, I see a handful of patients who are struggling with varying degrees of mental illness. Initiating a conversation about these conditions can be challenging, especially for people who are skeptical of doctors and our broken medical system.
Slater’s book providers a useful entry point for these patients and their families, and fills in many of the gaps that doctors fail to address in the course of a routine consultation — and she does so with uncommon honesty. “Thanks to psychiatry’s drugs,” she writes, “I have a mind that can appreciate the beauty around me, but on the other hand, thanks to psychiatry’s drugs, I am dying faster than you are.”
Matt McCarthy, an internist at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, is the author of The Real Doctor Will See You Shortly.