The medicalization of autonomy
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The medicalization of autonomy Joseph E Davis: Chemically imbalanced: everyday suffering, medication, and our troubled quest for self-mastery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020, 256 pp, $30.00 PB Shuko Tamao1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
When Rachel was in tenth grade, she received a B+ on a calculus examination, causing her to become upset, sad, and anxious. Despite confiding in her favorite teacher, she was unable to calm down. The school called her mother who took Rachel to their family doctor. The doctor proceeded to diagnose her with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). Rachel took an antidepressant for the rest of the year and then stopped. In college, she again experienced anxiety after a disappointing examination result, so she resumed taking medication. She viewed her anxiety as both adaptive and maladaptive. In other words, a certain amount of her anxiety could be beneficial if managed correctly because it shapes her work ethic and motivates her, but too much anxiety impedes her ability to maintain her high standards. She believed that this maladaptive anxiety was rooted in some faulty biological mechanism which required medication. In Chemically Imbalanced: Everyday Suffering, Medication, and Our Troubled Quest for Self-Mastery, sociologist Joseph Davis analyzes stories of ordinary Americans in distress. Davis is a Research Associate Professor of Sociology and a Director of Research at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, whose research subjects are bioethics, morality, narrative, and psychiatry. In the book, he engages in a qualitative analysis of eighty interviews conducted in various locations in America. More than half of the interviewees were on medication for such conditions as depression, GAD, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and about half had some experience of counseling. The study excluded those with such diagnoses as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder. The research team asked each interviewee to narrate the problem they have been experiencing, to identify what help they sought to mitigate that problem, and to assess how it affected their life goals. The problems described tended to be of an everyday nature and ranged from the * Shuko Tamao [email protected] 1
Center for Disability Studies, University at Buffalo, 552 Park Hall, Buffalo, NY 14260, USA
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loss of a loved one to the breakup of a relationship, and from underperformance in the workplace to feeling awkward at parties. Many interviewees explained their interaction with such everyday distress in the context of biology. They located the source of their shyness, anxiety, depression, or lack of concentration within their own bodies and considered such responses to unfortunate life events to be proof of their own maladaptation. They believed these responses were demonstrations of biological vulnerability that required medication in order that they might regulate their rogue brain chemistry and liv
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