Pharmaceutical Reason Knowledge and Value in Global Psychiatry [Hardcover]

An arresting case-study highlighting the social and political implications of a new 'pharmaceutical' way of thinking about human behaviour.Andrew Lakoff argues that a new 'pharmaceutical' way of thinking about and acting upon mental disorder is coming to reshape not only the field of psychiatry, but also our very notions of self. Drawing from a comprehensive ethnography of psychiatric practice in Argentina, Lakoff looks at new ways of understanding and intervening in human behaviour. Highlighting the social and political implications that these new forms of expertise about human behaviour and human thought bring, Lakoff presents an arresting case-study to appeal beyond psychiatry and the life sciences.Andrew Lakoff argues that a new 'pharmaceutical' way of thinking about and acting upon mental disorder is coming to reshape not only the field of psychiatry, but also our very notions of self. Drawing from a comprehensive ethnography of psychiatric practice in Argentina, Lakoff looks at new ways of understanding and intervening in human behaviour. Highlighting the social and political implications that these new forms of expertise about human behaviour and human thought bring, Lakoff presents an arresting case-study to appeal beyond psychiatry and the life sciences.When a French biotechnology company seeks patients in Buenos Aires with bipolar disorder for its gene discovery program, they have unexpected trouble finding enough subjects for the study. In Argentina, the predominant form of mental health expertise ? psychoanalysis ? does not recognize the legitimacy of bipolar disorder as a diagnostic entity. This problem points to a broader set of political and epistemological debates in global psychiatry. Drawing from an ethnography of psychiatric practice in Buenos Aires, Andrew Lakoff follows the contested extension of novel techniques for understanding and intervening in mental illness. He charts the globalization of the new biomedical psychiatry, and illustral“„