Pharmaceutical Self

“At the intersection of the growing domains of research on the permanent reinvention of the self and the empire of the drug industry in the contemporary world, Janis Jenkins’s edited volume brings together the best specialists of both fields to open the promising territory of an anthropology of psychopharmaceuticals. With its unique global perspective, the book explores the way in which psychotropic medicines against insomnia, depression, or psychosis affect bodies and minds but also transform the moral and political meanings of suffering and trauma.”
—Didier Fassin, the James D. Wolfensohn Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), coauthor of The Empire of Trauma

“Pharmaceutical Self plumbs the biosocial complexity inherent in the globalization of psychoactive drugs. The authors, ranking figures in medical anthropology, explore the collision of structural violence—poverty, gender inequality, discrimination, and disasters both natural and unnatural—and neuropsychiatry, and how social forces become embodied in adverse health outcomes and new subjectivities in psychiatric patients’ local worlds. The thematic, theoretical, and geographic breadth of this volume—with experience-near accounts from settings as different as underresourced clinics in Indonesia to homeless shelters in Chicago—provides valuable contributions to the burgeoning anthropology of psychopharmacology. Essential reading for any student of global mental health and for students of public health more generally.”
—Paul Farmer, Chair, Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School