In a recent piece for City Journal, Lee Siegel notes the “emotional blunting” he has encountered among friends taking antidepressants, and wonders whether “the widespread use of drugs that can abolish our ability to empathize with what another person is feeling risks creating a collective hell.” A question well worth asking. A related one: How many of your neighbors need to rely on mind-altering medicine to get through the day before you start to wonder whether it’s modern life, and not they, who is mad?

I ask because I am concerned about one worrisome outcome in particular: the inevitable rise of conformity in a psychiatrically medicated population. There is no shortage of cultural observers lamenting the groupthink among our youth. Aghast at story after story of campus conformity, they blame our propaganda-driven curriculum or teachers with agendas for squashing individual thinking. …

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