Volumes`I, II & III

Interviews by David Healy

Altman, London 1996, 1998; Arnold UK, 2000 

The Psychopharmacologists, is a three volume series, published in 1996, 1998, and 2000 respectively. It includes 78 edited audio-taped interviews by David Healy with 85 “psychopharmacologists,” including many of the pioneers in the field. According to Healy a major impetus that led to the publication of this series was that after writing the history of the British Association of Psychopharmacology he wanted to “branch out” because it was clear to him that if the “pioneers in the field (of psychopharmacology) were ever going to be interviewed, it had to be done now or never.” 

      In the interviews in these volumes, Healy sees the interviewer as the instrument through which the actors in an historical drama, in this case psychopharmacology, reveal themselves. Therefore it is important that readers know “how the gain on the instrument they are using has been set at least insofar as biases have been consciously registered.” To meet this   need, one year after the release of volume I, in 1997, he published his monograph, The Antidepressant Era, and two years after the release of the third volume, in 2002, he published his book on The Creation of Psychopharmacology. (Both were published by Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England).

Each interview in the series is presented with a title given by Healy or extracted from the interviewee, and each volume is complemented with a Dramatis Personae of the interviewees, in a vignette that reflects the most important contribution(s) of the interviewee to development of the field.

New and old hardcover copies of the three volumes of The Psychopharmacologists are available via AMAZON.