Pharmaceutical Self: The Global Shaping of Experience in an Age of Psychopharmacology (School for Advanced Research Advanced Seminar Series) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1934691380 ISBN 13: 9781934691380

Publisher: School for Advanced Research Press, 2011

Synopsis

This book addresses a critical contemporary issue--the worldwide proliferation of pharmaceutical use. The contributors explore questions such as: How are culturally constituted selves transformed by regular ingestion of pharmaceutical drugs? Does "being human" increasingly come to mean not only oriented to drugs but also created and regulated by them? From the standpoint of cultural phenomenology, does this reshape human "being"? An anthropological study that examines both human suffering and its biological realities,Pharmaceutical Self focuses on the social, cultural, and political aspects of the expanding distribution of psychopharmacological drugs.

About this title

About the Author:

Janis H. Jenkins is a psychological/medical anthropologist at the University of California, San Diego, and an internationally recognized scholar in the field of culture and mental health.

Review:

Pharmaceutical Self plumbs the biosocial complexity inherent in the globalization of psychoactive drugs. The authors, ranking figures in medical anthropology, explore the collision of structural violence poverty, gender inequality, discrimination, and disasters both natural and unnatural and neuropsychiatry, and how social forces become embodied in adverse health outcomes and new subjectivities in psychiatric patients local worlds. The thematic, theoretical, and geographic breadth of this volume with experience-near accounts from settings as different as underresourced clinics in Indonesia to homeless shelters in Chicago provides valuable contributions to the burgeoning anthropology of psychopharmacology. Essential reading for any student of global mental health and for students of public health more generally. --Paul Farmer, Chair, Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School

At the intersection of the growing domains of research on the permanent reinvention of the self and the empire of the drug industry in the contemporary world, Janis Jenkins's edited volume brings together the best specialists of both fields to open the promising territory of an anthropology of psychopharmaceuticals. With its unique global perspective, the book explores the way in which psychotropic medicines against insomnia, depression, or psychosis affect bodies and minds but also transform the moral and political meanings of suffering and trauma. --Didier Fassin, the James D. Wolfensohn Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton)

At the intersection of the growing domains of research on the permanent reinvention of the self and the empire of the drug industry in the contemporary world, Janis Jenkins's edited volume brings together the best specialists of both fields to open the promising territory of an anthropology of psychopharmaceuticals. With its unique global perspective, the book explores the way in which psychotropic medicines against insomnia, depression, or psychosis affect bodies and minds but also transform the moral and political meanings of suffering and trauma. --Didier Fassin, the James D. Wolfensohn Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton)

About this edition

• Publisher: School for Advanced Research Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1934691380
• ISBN 13: 9781934691380
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 280
• Editor: Jenkins Janis H.