{"id":347102,"date":"2018-11-02T13:14:08","date_gmt":"2018-11-02T17:14:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/?p=347102"},"modified":"2018-11-02T15:18:30","modified_gmt":"2018-11-02T19:18:30","slug":"psychiatrist-peter-kramer-looks-back-and-always-around-347102","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/psychiatrist-peter-kramer-looks-back-and-always-around-347102\/","title":{"rendered":"Psychiatrist Peter Kramer looks back\u2014and always, around"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Paul
Paul Kramer, clinical professor emeritus of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University, is the latest speaker in the Humanities Center Public Lecture Series. (Brown University photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Before he even began his medical training, psychiatrist Peter Kramer already thought of himself as a writer. He never let go of that self-conception.<\/p>\n

Now a clinical professor emeritus of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University, Kramer graduated from Harvard in 1970 with an undergraduate degree in history and literature. \u201cAnd I thought, \u2018why should I give that up?\u2019\u201d he recalls. Over the course of his career, he has followed his interests where they take him.<\/p>\n

Best known as the author of 1993\u2019s influential bestseller Listening to Prozac<\/em>\u2014an examination of the social and ethical implications of what was then a new kind of drug for treating depression\u2014Kramer has seven books currently in print. They include Should You Leave? A Psychiatrist Explores Intimacy and Autonomy\u2014and the Nature of Advice<\/em> (1997), Spectacular Happiness: A Novel<\/em> (2001), and Freud: Inventor of the Modern Mind<\/em> (2006). For 10 years, Kramer was a columnist for trade papers, writing an essay a month. He has published criticism of literature, theater, film, television, cooking, and even cartooning.<\/p>\n

He sees himself swimming against the tide of a society increasingly defined by specialization: \u201cI\u2019ve tried to take a stance, whether that was common in the profession or the culture or not, to feel free to say things about other things.\u201d<\/p>\n

It used to be common for psychiatrists to be consulted on a wide range of questions, from foreign policy to human behavior in all manner of contexts. But over the course of Kramer\u2019s career, ideas about the proper sphere of psychiatric expertise and the evidence psychiatrists can properly draw on has changed. That transformation is the subject of a lecture he\u2019ll will give on November 8, as part of the Humanities Center Public Lecture Series.<\/a><\/p>\n

Sigmund Freud \u201cwrote about anthropology and religion and sociology and politics\u2014he had a very broad range of what his standing as a psychoanalyst permitted him to do,\u201d says Kramer. \u201cAnd the question is, what happened to that?\u201d<\/p>\n

Kramer began treating patients in the early 1970s; he closed his practice earlier this year. A specialist in clinical depression, he has been a pivotal figure in debates about depression\u2019s nature and treatments during the intervening years. The Atlantic<\/em> calls Kramer a \u201creluctant warrior, or perhaps more accurately a cautious one\u201d on the subject of antidepressant medications. \u201cHe makes a case for psychiatry itself as a humanistic science that bridges the impersonal ideals of the laboratory and the pragmatic exigencies of clinical intervention,\u201d writes Jonathan Rosen in the magazine\u2019s review of Kramer\u2019s 2016 book, Ordinarily Well: The Case for Antidepressants<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\n

Expertise and Evidence: A Psychiatrist\u2019s Perspective<\/h3>\n

Peter Kramer<\/strong>
\nNovember 8, 5 p.m.
\nHawkins-Carlson Room
\nRush Rhees Library
\nFree and open to the public<\/p>\n

This talk is part of the 2018\u201319 Humanities Center Public Lecture Series, this year exploring the theme of expertise and evidence.<\/p>\n

Peter Kramer is a clinical professor emeritus of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University. His books include Listening to Prozac<\/em> (1993) and Ordinarily Well: The Case for Antidepressants<\/em> (2016). He has written for the New York Times Magazine<\/em>, the Washington Post<\/em>, and the (London) Times Literary Supplement<\/em>, among other outlets.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The book\u2019s context is a dispute over the kind of evidence that should be relied on in evaluating the efficacy of antidepressant drugs. \u201cThis book is about two influences on medical practice: rigorous trials and clinical encounters,\u201d Kramer writes in the introduction. He worries that the first\u2014the touchstone of evidence-based medicine\u2014doesn\u2019t leave sufficient place for the knowledge physicians develop in working directly with patients. He calls evidence-based medicine \u201can attempt to make what we call evidence narrower than it used to be, so that the question, for doctors, is, what counts as evidence?\u201d<\/p>\n

Questions about evidence also cut to the heart of a doctor\u2019s expertise, he contends. \u201cWhen I was entering the field, there was a very broad scope afforded to psychiatrists, just by virtue of their profession. And here we were years later, not asking doctors to comment on broad things, but also doubting the very narrow, specific things that doctors know well.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the culture at large, matters of expertise and evidence are generally contentious, but psychiatry, he suggests, is in an especially tenuous position. The anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s and 1970s\u2014what he calls a response to psychoanalytic \u201cover-reaching\u201d\u2014has become \u201ca critique of medical psychiatry and pharmacology over-reaching,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Kramer is widely known not just as a practitioner of psychiatry but as one who reflects on the field and its implication for patients and society. As psychiatry has changed, its ties to other areas of intellectual inquiry have altered, too.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think the humanities have been very broadly influenced by a form of psychiatry that really is in psychiatry\u2019s past,\u201d he says, \u201cand they\u2019re much less influenced by psychiatry as it is now.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sigmund Freud could write about a broad range of subjects, from religion to politics. In this age of specialization, why has that changed? Kramer, a clinical professor emeritus at Brown University, tackles this topic in the Humanities Center Public Lecture Series.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":752,"featured_media":347112,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[456],"tags":[14,25132],"class_list":["post-347102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-society-culture","tag-events","tag-humanities-center"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nPsychiatrist Peter Kramer looks back\u2014and always, around<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/psychiatrist-peter-kramer-looks-back-and-always-around-347102\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Psychiatrist Peter Kramer looks back\u2014and always, around\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Sigmund Freud could write about a broad range of subjects, from religion to politics. 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