I recently read the French novelist Michel Houllebecq's Serotonin, and my initial reaction was that it would be useful to assign to students of psychotherapy and psychiatry—though I'm pretty sure this will never happen. It will never happen for a few reasons, not least that the novel includes some shocking and frankly abhorrent scenes, of the kind for which Houllebecq is well-known. Nonetheless, reading past or around these scenes, as well as various issues in French politics that tend to animate Houllebecq's work, Serotonin can be read as a melancholy memoir of a certain kind of patient, one who tends not to be prominent in our thinking about psychological treatments, if only because he so rarely shows up.

As its title indicates, the novel is nominally concerned with its narrator's serotonin levels, and in particular with a new (fictional) medication, Captorix, which is supposed to elevate them. As it happens, Houllebecq's novel already feels a touch outdated in this respect. Not long after its publication, a major study (Moncrieff et al. 2022) cast doubt on the hypothesis that low serotonin is the primary culprit in depression, and on whether standard anti-depressants actually increase serotonin levels anyway. So, as a work of psychiatry, Houllebecq's novel may be already superseded. But, on further consideration, this novel—despite its title—was never really........

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