SAMUEL BARONDES is the director of the Center for Neurobiology and Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco. He is the author of Better Than Prozac: Creating the Next Generation of Psychiatric Drugs.
Personality—the pattern of thoughts, feelings, and actions that is typical of each of us—is generally formed by early adulthood. But many people still want to change. Some, for example, consider themselves too gloomy and uptight and want to become more cheerful and flexible. Whatever their aims, they often turn to therapists, self-help books, and religious practices.
In the past few decades, certain psychiatric medications have become an additional tool for those seeking control of their lives. Initially designed to be used for a few months to treat episodic psychological disturbances such as severe depression, they are now being widely prescribed for indefinite use to produce sustained shifts in certain personality traits. Prozac is the best known of these, but many others are on the market or in development. By directly affecting brain circuits that control emotions, these medications can produce desirable effects that may be hard to replicate by sheer force of will or behavioral exercises. Millions take them continually, year after year, to modulate personality.
Nevertheless, the idea of using such drugs to change personality is still dangerous—and not because manipulation of brain chemicals is intrinsically cowardly, immoral, or a threat to the social order. On the contrary, many people feel that they have the opposite effect, helping to increase personal responsibility. The reason for caution is that there have not been any controlled studies of the influence of these drugs on personality over the many years that some people take them. So this is a dangerous idea that can and should be tested, to find out if such sustained drug use is really helpful and if this practice should be continued.