Depression, performativity and the conflicted body: An auto-ethnography of self-medication

Abstract

In this article, I discuss intimate practices of self-medication in relation to political preoccupations with the ethics of the pharmaceutical economy, and discursive constructions of illness. Partly self-ethnographic, the article draws from my personal experience of clinical depression, and the discomforts in thinking of myself as a ‘depressed’ subject who consumes medications. Intervening in debates on new materialism and affect studies, I offer an account of dynamics where the material and the discursive, the human and the non-human, the personal and the political converge. I suggest that the experience and performative effects of self-medication lie not only in the activation of chemical compounds, but in the conscious bodily animation of cognitive and affective relations with medications. In this analysis, I employ creative forms of writing, to find a language of distress that blurs the boundary between the material and the discursive.