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Chemically Imbalanced: Everyday Suffering, Medication, and Our Troubled Quest for Self-Mastery de Joseph E. Davis

Chemically Imbalanced: Everyday Suffering, Medication, and Our Troubled Quest for Self-Mastery

Autor Joseph E. Davis
en Limba Engleză Hardback – 10 mar 2020

În cadrul programelor de sociologie medicală și psihologie socială, Chemically Imbalanced ocupă un loc central prin analiza critică a modului în care am redefinit suferința umană. Ne-a atras atenția modul în care Joseph E. Davis documentează marea transformare a ultimelor decenii: abandonarea introspecției și a jurnalului în favoarea pilulei. Subliniem faptul că autorul nu se limitează la o critică teoretică, ci oferă un raport de teren bazat pe interviuri cu oameni obișnuiți, a căror dificultăți existențiale — de la doliu la subperformanță — sunt acum traduse în limbajul arid al chimiei cerebrale.

Această abordare completează perspectiva oferită de Chemicals for the Mind de Ernest Keen, adăugând o dimensiune etnografică esențială; în timp ce Keen se concentrează pe tradițiile dualiste ale limbajului, Davis urmărește modul în care aceste concepte sunt internalizate de subiecți în viața de zi cu zi. Din punct de vedere structural, volumul progresează logic de la fundamentarea „imaginarului neurobiologic” către consecințele sociale ale „biologizării suferinței”, culminând cu o analiză a ceea ce autorul numește „criza spiritului”.

Merită menționat că lucrarea se înscrie într-o linie de cercetare constantă a autorului, fiind strâns legată de temele din To Fix or to Heal. Dacă în acea lucrare Davis chestiona limitele biomedicinei în raport cu îngrijirea pacienților, în Chemically Imbalanced el extinde analiza asupra modului în care viziunea mecanicistă ne privează de oportunitatea de a înțelege adevărurile profunde despre condițiile sociale în care trăim. Este o lectură care recalibrează înțelegerea noastră asupra sinelui într-o epocă dominată de soluții farmacologice rapide.

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Specificații

ISBN-13: 9780226686547
ISBN-10: 022668654X
Pagini: 256
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 18 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Ediția:First Edition
Editura: University of Chicago Press
Colecția University of Chicago Press

De ce să citești această carte

Recomandăm această carte sociologilor, psihologilor și studenților interesați de intersecția dintre sănătatea mintală și cultura contemporană. Cititorul va câștiga o înțelegere critică asupra modului în care diagnosticele medicale pot uneori să mascheze probleme existențiale sau sociale. Este un argument solid pentru recuperarea sensului în fața tendinței actuale de a reduce complexitatea suferinței umane la simple erori de neurotransmisie.

Despre autor

Joseph E. Davis este profesor cercetător asociat în sociologie și director de cercetare la Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture din cadrul Universității din Virginia. În calitate de editor al publicației The Hedgehog Review, Davis s-a remarcat prin analizele sale asupra identității și schimbării sociale. Opera sa, care include titluri precum To Fix or to Heal și Identity and Social Change, explorează constant tensiunea dintre metodele tehnice ale medicinei moderne și nevoile profunde ale condiției umane. Experiența sa în cercetarea etnografică îi permite să combine rigoarea academică cu o înțelegere empatică a experienței individuale.

Descriere scurtă

Everyday suffering—those conditions or feelings brought on by trying circumstances that arise in everyone’s lives—is something that humans have grappled with for millennia. But the last decades have seen a drastic change in the way we approach it. In the past, a person going through a time of difficulty might keep a journal or see a therapist, but now the psychological has been replaced by the biological: instead of treating the heart, soul, and mind, we take a pill to treat the brain.

Chemically Imbalanced is a field report on how ordinary people dealing with common problems explain their suffering, how they’re increasingly turning to the thin and mechanistic language of the “body/brain,” and what these encounters might tell us. Drawing on interviews with people dealing with struggles such as underperformance in school or work, grief after the end of a relationship, or disappointment with how their life is unfolding, Joseph E. Davis reveals the profound revolution in consciousness that is underway. We now see suffering as an imbalance in the brain that needs to be fixed, usually through chemical means. This has rippled into our social and cultural conversations, and it has affected how we, as a society, imagine ourselves and envision what constitutes a good life. Davis warns that what we envision as a neurological revolution, in which suffering is a mechanistic problem, has troubling and entrapping consequences. And he makes the case that by turning away from an interpretive, meaning-making view of ourselves, we thwart our chances to enrich our souls and learn important truths about ourselves and the social conditions under which we live.

Notă biografică

Joseph E. Davis is research professor of sociology and moderator of the picturing the human colloquy of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Accounts of Innocence: Sexual Abuse, Trauma, and the Self, also from the University of Chicago Press, and coeditor, most recently, of To Fix or to Heal: Patient Care, Public Health, and the Limits of Biomedicine and The Evening of Life: The Challenges of Aging and Dying Well.

Cuprins

Preface

Introduction
One / The Neurobiological Imaginary
Two / The Biologization of Everyday Suffering
Three / Appropriating Disorder
Four / Resisting Differentness
Five / Seeking Viable Selfhood
Six / After Psychology
Conclusion / A Crisis of the Spirit
 
Acknowledgments
Appendix
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Recenzii

“Suffering is that experience that seems to escape the bounds of our rational explanations and of the science mobilized to cure it. Chemically Imbalanced documents the ways in which neurobiological metaphors have taken hold of such experience of suffering, reducing it to a mechanical response to the world. This book is an urgent and much-needed addition to our understanding of the many ways in which social control is exerted through the control of suffering. It will compel us to ask questions about the very nature of therapy.”

“Davis’s Chemically Imbalanced tackles a profound issue. Twenty years ago, most of us would have figured people always have and always will explain themselves and what they do in terms of reasons and motives. It was inconceivable we might think in terms of some glitch. Now, as Davis shows, many of us figure it’s natural to think in terms of glitches that can be adjusted with meds, the way you might manage your eyesight. In this illuminating book, Davis doesn’t force an explanation for this change down our throats, but he will leave readers wondering just how this happened and what, if anything, we should be doing about it.”

"Recommended" 

"Chemically Imbalanced is an excellent addition to the works in social sciences and humanities that examine the distress of ordinary Americans from the second half of the twentieth century onward, a period when commercialized pills and the psychology-based notion of self-improvement entered the minds of Americans."

"Chemically Imbalanced raises important questions, offers new insight into the power and reach of the biomedical model and neurobiological thinking, and I highly recommend it. I encourage readers to assign it, especially in graduate-level mental health and illness classes—or any class looking for a discussion on people’s experiences with suffering and the broad impacts of biomedical thinking and treatment."

"In any event, we have sort of two ideologies working together in sync today: one of the 'neurobiological imaginary,' to justify taking drugs for everyday unhappiness, and to keep people from feeling badly for doing so; the other of the imagined higher self, which lets people feel proud in another way. What Davis has helped to expose is the contradiction in all this, the juxtaposition of the biological with the purely psychological. Tocqueville may have put the situation best when, over a century ago, he criticized scientists who went on stage to preach their doctrine of pure materialism, not unlike the way some scientists today preach the link between brain matter and mood. He observed they were as proud as gods, while declaring that man was less than a beast. Davis may have caught the same peculiar, yet, oh so human, tension within the 'neurobiological imaginary.'"

"In our 'troubled quest for self-mastery,' Davis implies, the risk that we’ll misconstrue factors as pervasive as self-criticism and self-contempt by rendering them somatic malfunctions all but guarantees that the suffering will continue—and will, as a result, continue to be misunderstood and mistreated."

"Chemically Imbalanced will no doubt motivate important scholarship." 

"It can be difficult for pharmaceutical historians to know as much as we should about the single most important characters in our histories: the people who actually consume medicines... Ethnographies and interview-based research provide a crucial resource for filling this gap, especially historically informed works like Joseph Davis’s Chemically Imbalanced, which is based on eighty interviews with people who identified themselves as struggling with sadness, anxiety, or concentration and attention problems... Davis’s analysis is insightful and empathic, and historians will find it useful as we work to understand the archivally elusive main characters in our own narratives."