Ocean State Libraries

A successful pharmaceutical salesperson falls in love and then devises a plan to leave her job by being brutally honest with physicians about her drugs' side effects. Ironically, her sales go through the roof.

A young woman's world unravels when a drug prescribed by her psychiatrist has unexpected side effects.

Les Franken is a kind-hearted and soft-spoken man who loves reading comic books. He's the type of guy who most people walk by on the street without even noticing. He is someone who is completely average and virtually invisible. Everything changes for Les the day he is accepted into an experimental drug study. As he begins to take the drugs, an unexpected side effect occurs -- he develops special powers. In an effort to use his new talents for protecting...

"When the application for a new sedative called Kevadon--commonly known as thalidomide--landed on Frances Kelsey's desk at the FDA in 1960, it seemed destined to sail through the review process. The drug, billed as entirely risk-free, was already being sold in forty-six countries. But when Kelsey learned that the drug caused terrible birth defects, she and a team of dedicated doctors, parents, and journalists fought Merrell, the drug's American manufacturer,...

Medications for everything from depression and anxiety to ADHD and insomnia are being prescribed in alarming numbers across the country, but the "cure" is often worse than the original problem. Medication Madness is a fascinating, frightening, and dramatic look at the role that psychiatric medications have played in fifty cases of suicide, murder, and other violent, criminal, and bizarre behaviors. As a psychiatrist who believes in holding people...

"In 1992 Stephen Fried's wife, Diane, took a pill her doctor gave her for a minor infection and ended up in the emergency room. She was a victim of "the other drug problem," adverse reactions to prescription and over-the-counter medications that kill more people every year than all illegal drug use combined. Some drug reactions go away after a few days. Diane's did not. Fried set out to investigate the pharmaceutical safety net his wife had fallen...

As the mental health reporter for the Boston Globe, Alison Bass's front-page reporting on conflicts of interest in medical research stunned readers, and her series on sexual misconduct among psychiatrists earned a Pulitzer Prize nomination. Now she turns her investigative skills to a controversial case that exposed the increased suicide rates among adolescents taking antidepressants such as Paxil, Prozac, and Zoloft. Side Effects tells the tale of...