Twenty-five years after pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly unleashed Prozac on the red-braced 80s, SSRIs are still the world’s most popular antidepressants. They are swallowed by more than 40 million people, from Beijing to Beirut, knitting a web of happiness from New York to New Caledonia. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, of which Prozac is the best known, are the defining drug of the modern age, the crutch of choice for the worried well. In the US, where one in 10 takes antidepressants, you can buy beef-flavoured Prozac for your dog, trademarked Reconcile. The Prozac revolution has not only changed the way we think about depression (aided by Eli Lilly’s mammoth advertising campaign); it has also changed the way we think, full stop.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2013/may/19/does-prozac-help-artists-be-creative
A mother’s attempt to ban Anne Frank‘s diary from classrooms in Michigan over “pornographic” anatomical descriptions has failed, after a committee ruled that the title’s removal “would effectively impose situational censorship“.
Earlier this month the mother of a 12-year-old in the Northville school district in Michigan raised concerns with the school about her daughter reading the “definitive” version of Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl, in which Frank writes how “until I was 11 or 12, I didn’t realise there was a second set of labia on the inside, since you couldn’t see them. What’s even funnier is that I thought urine came out of the clitoris”, and “when you’re standing up, all you see from the front is hair. Between your legs there are two soft, cushiony things, also covered with hair, which press together when you’re standing, so you can’t see what’s inside. They separate when you sit down and they’re very red and quite fleshy on the inside. In the upper part, between the outer labia, there’s a fold of skin that, on second thought, looks like a kind of blister. That’s the clitoris.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/may/16/censor-anne-frank-diary-schools-fails
