Hers was one of the first books to criticize antidepressants, but others followed: Dr. Peter Breggin's 1995 "Talking Back to Prozac," Dr. Joseph Glenmullen's 2000 "Prozac Backlash," Dr. David Healy's 2004 "Let Them Eat Prozac." As the titles suggest, Prozac has become shorthand for antidepressant, the way Kleenex is shorthand for tissue, because Prozac was the first of a new class of antidepressants called SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors). But there are now plenty of others, including Paxil, Effexor, Zoloft and Luvox.

According to IMS Health, a market research company for the pharmaceutical industry, sales of antidepressants worldwide in 2003 reached $19.5 billion, up 10 percent from 2002. Some of this growth, according to the IMS Web site, can be attributed to the use of antidepressants in "lifestyle disorders," which now include or could feasibly include, according to IMS, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, smoking cessation, weight loss and shyness — a list that causes some people, like Jim Harper of prozactruth.com, to complain that antidepressants are now prescribed "if you bite your nails."

Tracy started the International Coalition for Drug Awareness in 1997. The coalition has a Web site, www.drugawareness.org, volunteer directors in 30 states and board members in Bulgaria and Singapore. The most celebrated member of her board is Dr. Candace Pert, the Georgetown University School of Medicine neuroscientist who a generation ago helped discover and map the kind of receptors that regulate mood and health.

On the case

Distraught parents of suicidal teens, and the relatives and attorneys of people accused of murder, call Tracy asking for her help. But Tracy also keeps her antennae up for stories about violent deaths that might possibly be linked to antidepressants. If she reads a newspaper account about a man, say, who has gone on a shooting rampage at work — as happened in July at a ConAgra Foods plant in Kansas — she will immediately get on the phone to flesh out the details, trying to find out if the assailant had been on an antidepressant. Occasionally the victims are famous, and sometimes the assailants become famous for their horrific crimes, but either way Tracy is not afraid to insert herself into their lives or their deaths.