- Summary
- Contents
- Subject index
`This is a wonderful volume, powerfully written, timely, insightful, and filled with major pieces; the passion, intellectual rigor and sense of history found here promises to shape this field in the decades to come. This volume sets the agenda for the future' - Norman K Denzin, University of Illinois Pathology and the Postmodern explores the relationship between mental distress and social constructionism using new work from eminent scholars in the fields of sociology, psychology and philosophy. The authors address: how specific cultural, economic and historical forces converge in contemporary psychiatry and psychology; how new syndromes, subjectivities and identities are being constructed and
Chapter 8: Is it Me or is it Prozac? Antidepressants and the Construction of Self
Is it Me or is it Prozac? Antidepressants and the Construction of Self
Since the 1950s, psychiatry has increasingly turned toward drug therapy in the treatment of depression.1 In the late 1980s, the use of antidepressant drugs accelerated greatly, drug therapy for depression became widely publicized, and the social construction of depression as a biological illness began to solidify. One of the drugs most responsible for this transformation of public attitude and medical practice is fluoxetine hydrochloride, marketed by Eli Lilly since 1987 under the trade name Prozac. In this essay we examine the implications of this and other antidepressants for self-theory. We probe the possible impact of ...
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