As medical anthropology pushes and pries further into the recesses of psychopharmaceutical experience, patient dialogues are being evaluated for critical elements that are involved in shaping universal discourse on psychopharmaceutical usage and for instances of unique reflection that have potential to shape such universals.
A notoriously hard group to study, psychopharmaceutical patients form an amorphous population of entering and exiting members, some being pinched off upon recovery or through non-compliance, some being pushed to the outlying sides likely to be marginalized due to lack of access and many dropped right in the center, with adequate access to and standing prescriptions for medications they will willingly take. With so many subjects slipping interchangeably through the semi-permeable membrane when switching medications, altering treatment regimes, losing access to either prescribing doctors or the drugs themselves, the center becomes opportune for statistically significant findings due to a steady and growing subject pool. I plead for a closer examination of those on the margins, slipping in and out between the confines of the group, as they reflect reflexively upon the vacillating accessibility of psychopharmaceuticals and prescribing professionals to those uninsured as well as the heavy negotiations that must take place when on such medications.
Here are some issues I will approach in the coming months:
1. Non-Compliance. Why don’t mentally ill people just take their meds to get better? Why do people suddenly stop their medications despite doctor’s orders? Why are these medications hard to gain reliable access to? Why do you hear in the news of perpetrators being mentally ill but “off their meds”?
2. Agency and Autonomy in Patienthood. Can the patient really know better than the psychiatrist? Isn’t it dangerous to “play doctor”? Can patients get high off of their meds?
3. The Road to Recovery. Why is it so hard to recover from mental illness despite all the medication options? Can’t people just try harder to get better; i.e. “mind over matter”? Why does it take so long to treat mental illness successfully?
4. The Cocktail. Why do our psychiatrists seem to overmedicate? Do some people really need seven medications a day to function? Are these people just drug addicts? Are “pill-pusher” doctors trying to make money?
These inquiries make up the scaffolding behind my research thesis. I’ve been asked all these questions personally and have seen them addressed by many medical anthropologists. These standing misconceptions persist despite the ever-increasing public exposure biomedical psychiatry has gained in public media as of late. These are also some of the issues that demand attention in order to have productive discussion over the challenges this patient population faces and the ramifications these challenges place on living day-to-day life with a mental illness. The day when my research comes to fruition I hope will prove to be a more hopeful environment for those with mental illness, where there is more understanding and therefore less stigma and, perhaps, a little more lightheartedness surrounding these powerful drugs.
