Self-compliance at ‘Prozac campus’

Abstract

This paper focuses on psychiatric medication experiences among a sample of North American university students to explore a new cultural and social landscape of medication ‘compliance.’ In this landscape, patients assume significant personal decision-making power in terms of dosages, when to discontinue use and even what medications to take. Patients carefully monitor and regulate their moods, and actively gather and circulate newly legitimated blends of expert and experiential knowledge about psychiatric medications among peers, family members and their physicians. The medications too, take a vital role in shaping this landscape, and help to create the spaces for meaning-making and interpretation described and explored in this article. In concluding the article, the authors claim that two popular academic discourses in medical anthropology, one of patient empowerment and shared decision-making and the other of technologies of self and governmentality, may fail to account for other orders of reality that this paper describes – orders shaped and influenced by unconscious, unexpressed and symbolic motivations.