Schizophrenia, Neuropharmaceutical Cultures and Patient Potentialities

• In Event: Neurosocieties: Interdisciplinary Explorations of the Brain, Culture and Ethics 2

Abstract

The severe manifestations and outcomes for those being treated for serious mental illnesses in Western societies is of pressing concern, as gaps in life expectancy widen despite greater access to healthcare. My anthropological enquiry into pharmaceutically-treated schizophrenia is positioned at the intersection between social and biomedical sciences and technologies. I explore the lived meanings of benefit-to-risk ratios when it comes to cognitive efficacy and drug side effects of the ‘gold standard’ antipsychotic drug clozapine. Clozapine is regularly monitored via blood work and cardio-metabolic checks, as patients commonly face multiple ‘physical’ health conditions alongside ‘incomplete recovery’ from schizophrenia. Drawing on 18 months of fieldwork at two ‘clozapine clinics’ in Australia and the UK, I argue that there is a dissonance between patient and clinical conceptions. Patients in my study worked actively and creatively with their circumstances and the biomedical imaginaries available to them to temporally experience agentic freedoms and personhood, and ‘health’ beyond their clinical symptoms. Building on the phenomenological underpinnings of schizophrenia, I suggest why these potentials for self-reclamations and experiential forms of well-being deserve careful attention from clinicians and researchers otherwise focusing primarily on neurobiological treatment possibilities. Moreover, my research would not have been possible without careful collaboration with a neuropsychiatrist who had not previously been exposed to ethnographic approaches. My project thus evidences the productivity of interdisciplinary endeavours, adding stimulus to pursuits of STS when it comes to exploring the brain and the role of culture.

Author

• Julia Brown, Ms