The Next Prozac is a Model - by J. - Anagenesis

The DSM is about to open again. Not from molecules, but from models this time. Welcome to the frontier: the pharmacology of the self. Models now participate in how people construct meaning and selfhood. Models are becoming the new psychotropics, reshaping human narrative coherence. Healy wrote that changes in how we manage drugs and insanity alter how we experience ourselves. It’s happening again. A drug with no molecule. Slop as a blunt try at coherence. Sometimes that’s all we have left. What Prozac did to serotonin, LLMs do to sense-making. Something is breaking and we can’t agree on what it is. We stare at the screen until the answer arrives, nodding as if the nod itself is therapy. The rise of SSRIs in the late 20th century was not just a chemical triumph but also a narrative one. As David Healy documents in The Antidepressant Era (1997), the DSM-III’s diagnostic categories and the “chemical imbalance” story created a cultural permission structure to medicalize sadness and anxiety

The DSM is about to open again. Not from molecules, but from models this time. Welcome to the frontier: the pharmacology of the self. Models now participate in how people construct meaning and selfhood. Models are becoming the new psychotropics, reshaping human narrative coherence. Healy wrote that changes in how we manage drugs and insanity alter how we experience ourselves. It’s happening again. A drug with no molecule. Slop as a blunt try at coherence. Sometimes that’s all we have left. What Prozac did to serotonin, LLMs do to sense-making. Something is breaking and we can’t agree on what i