Pharmakon
by Dirk Wittenborn

Release Date: 2nd Feb 2009
Publisher: Bloomsbury
ISBN: 978 0 7475 9810 7
RRP: £12.99

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Fascinating and disturbing...

The poison is the remedy, the remedy is the poison. Pharmakon is a disturbingly detailed and intimate portrayal of a psychologist's life and ambitions in the 1950's, just as the hype towards pharmaceuticals is beginning to emerge. Dr Friedrich is three-quarters crazy and one-quarter genius; he is also a highly ambitious professor at Yale, hell-bent on making his name and becoming one of those guys who lives on the hill (both metaphorically and literally). Friedrich wants to feel justified in feeling superior to everyone around him, instead he is dauntingly aware of his narcissism, but fails to positively acknowledge it. He has a young, attractive wife and three children. Two girls and a boy. Life would be great, if only he could make it.

Dr Winton is everything Friedrich abhors and yet wants so desperately to be. She is super rich, elegant and has a certain nonchalance about her vocation as psychiatrist. They are thrown together through Friedrich's obsession with finding a cure for depression; or as he would put it - a pill for happiness. The drug they produce proves successful on rats, but when they undertake a clinical trial on forty subjects, one of which is a certain, Casper Gedsic (a brilliant but unstable student), they are not prepared for the eventual outcome. Casper morphs from socially inept and uninspiring, to apparent stud muffin over night - such a colossal success makes Friedrich see dollar signs, but not the glaringly, scary ones he should have been looking for. When the trials are over and the drug taken from Casper - he becomes enraged to the point of murder. A simple but awful misjudgement will scar Friedrich and his family for the rest of their lives.

Skip forward and there is another child, Zach. Friedrich's youngest son and the immediate target for Casper once he had escaped from his mental institution. Instead of being a terrifying ordeal, Zach finds himself confused by the episode - Casper was nothing but kind to him... He taught him how to swim (admittedly, he nearly drowned); he cannot possibly understand why his parents are reacted so bizarrely, or why there are suddenly armed policemen on every exit to his house. Zach's life will never be the same again.

Pharmakon is not an easy read, but then who says that books have to be in order to be enjoyable? Although, I wouldn't exactly describe this book as enjoyable - it's too unique for that, too well ordered, too acutely intimate. It lays bare the vast array of human conditions that is pigeon-holed into that one-size-fits-all name: crazy. It second-guesses itself constantly, which is hardly reassuring since the preposition of the story is that of a psychologist who aids pharmaceutical companies create new and more wondrous drugs that control our emotions, fears and various states of madness.

Perhaps the lesson it aims to teach us is that the human condition cannot be cured and that madness is just part of that condition. Perhaps it also illustrates perfectly how one's quest for happiness is almost certain to result in failure; the never-ending pursuit denying us any chance of enjoying the moment. "The past is history, the future a mystery, but today is a gift and that is why it is called the Present" - never rang truer. I'd still like to know what happened to Casper in the end.

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