The Zemiology of Psychiatric Medication

Abstract

The consumption of psychiatric medications is pervasive in almost all modernWestern societies. This paper analyzes the processes and actors through which mental health knowledge-claims come to exist in social consciousness, and how these claims become almost inextricable from the biochemical, molecular treatment of mental illness through psychiatric medications (Rose & Abi-Rached, 2013).This paper argues that the pervasive prescription of psychiatric medications is a social activity that, to a signi cant extent, is directed by dominant sites of power such as nation-states and corporations that operate interdependently.The dominant pedagogies of mental disease and psychiatric treatment are harmful insofar as individuals are responsibilized with living an optimal way-of-being through the increasingly ubiquitous process of biochemical management.The management of the human mind through brain biochemistry has the potential to generate mass social harms so long as concepts of mental illness lack clear etiologies and psychiatric medicinal treatments lack disease-centered ef cacies (Breggin, 2008; Breggin, 2011). If the enforcement of crime is about public security, then the magnitude of harms arising from mental health treatment pedagogies can logically be conceptualized as state-corporate crimes, but rarely are.