Joanna Moncrieff - The Myth of the Chemical Cure: The Politics of Psychiatric Drug Treatment

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Center for Global Humanities

Education


The seminar challenges the myth that psychiatric drugs reverse underlying chemical imbalances or abnormal brain states. It traces the historical development of this idea, and how it replaced an earlier understanding of psychiatric drugs as psychoactive substances that produce altered mental states, which can suppress the symptoms or manifestations of mental disorders. The seminar suggests that the current view of psychiatric drug treatment reflects political, commercial and professional interests rather than scientific fact. The seminar also explores the way that psychiatric drug treatment has promoted increasing medicalisation of human distress and social problems which has facilitated neoliberal social and economic policies.