The author, a psychiatrist, looks at anti-depressant drugs. Prescribing them to patients for 15 years, and believing in their usefulness, he looks at the simple cases of drug use, as well as using his experience with private patients and his broad reading of literature to address the nature of the self. Sometimes anti-depressants alter what the patient considers his character, not his illness, sometimes drugs improve performance in social and work life - memory, articulation, dexterity - and this introduces the possibility of taking anti-depressants the way you would get a nose job. Will these drugs be abused? More importantly, do they obstruct the dialogue between the psychiatrist and his patient, between the patient and his or herself by obscuring the origins and individual manifestations of illness?