The psychological patter of the '70s is as inescapable as Muzak and just as numbing: Are you relating? Going through heavy changes? In touch with yourself and doing your own thing? Are you up front, or just hung up and uptight? Boston Writer R.D. (for Richard Dean) Rosen calls it psychobabble, and in his new book by that title (Atheneum, $8.95) sees America awash in soggy therapeutic clichés.

In a public lecture hosted by the British Association for Psychopharmacology and Bristol’s MRC Integrative Epidemiology Unit (where I work), Professors George Davey Smith and David Nutt stripped away the sensationalisation and misinformation around statins and SSRIs. They come from very different fields, George is an epidemiologist and David a psychiatrist, but both fields can help us understand the efficacy and safety of drug treatments.

Let the grave close over the hand that has laboured through feverish midnights,—over the warm heart that beat so painfully; let the ear be closed to that applause which was its sweetest music;—and then how lavish we grow of all that was before so harshly denied! Then the marble is carved with eulogium; then the life is written; and thousands are lavish of pity and sympathy: every thing is given when it is too late to give anything!

And where a barrister, in summing up the items proved before him as arbitrator, misadded them, and thereby by mistake omitted 23l. in favour of the plaintiff, the Court, even at the instance of the barrister, would not allow an amendment, the defendant's counsel objecting.