A Bíblia da farmacologia e os antidepressivos

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ABSTRACT
If pain and suffering are inherent to the human condition, the manner in
which we deal with such conditions has been diverse in different
sociocultural and historical contexts. The use of antidepressive
medication to cure conditions related to sadness, which can demonstrate
symptoms characterized by physical and psychic suffering, is a
biomedicinal therapeutic strategy used since the emergence of such
drugs. The abuse of such medication has become highly questioned.
Inquiries have surfaced in relation to the reduction of suffering to purely
biological aspects, thereby excluding a comprehensive approach of
health problems that would not be solely restricted to an intervention of
endogenous biochemical alterations. The aim of this study is to identify
how pharmacology and the antidepressant drugs were introduced to
physicians and medical students in the second half of XX century and to
analyze which argumentative strategies are utilized in justifying the use
of such drugs via scientific discourse. In order to achieve this aim, we
have analyzed the different editions of the primary textbook of
pharmacology, used in various countries during the XX century as a
means of disseminating scientific knowledge: Goodman and Gilman:
The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics, the commonly
recognized “bible of Pharmacology”. Initially examined are the clinical
conditions related to depression, a medical category that gave origin to
“antidepressants”, by means of melancholia in the early days of
biomedicine. Analyzed were texts from doctors such as Pinel, Esquirol,
and Dagonet from earlier periods, in which modern medicine was
“born”, the second half of the XVIII century, the XIX century, and a
brief passage through the beginning of the XX century, when works
from such authors as Kraeplin and Freud brought forth questions
regarding the imprecision of medical diagnosis in the area of
psychological distress. Goodman and Gilman’s textbooks, from the first
edition (in 1941) through the eleventh edition (in 2006), have been
analyzed from a historical perspective, using discourse analysis as a
methodological strategy. We tried to identify issues that influenced both
the development of knowledge in the area of pharmacology as well as
the development of such medications labeled antidepressants. From the
analysis of texts, one can conclude that: difficulties exist when
specifying the situations in which the antidepressants are utilized, via
the uncertainties of clinical diagnosis; the attempts, from de
pharmacological knowledge, to establish a causal relationship between