Self-Transformation Narratives of Psychopharmaceutical Users in Uruguay

• In Event: Becoming Otherwise: STS Inroads into Techniques of the Better Self - II: Limits and Agency

Abstract

This presentation analyses self-transformation narratives of psychopharmaceutical users in Uruguay. Psychopharmaceutical prescribing and consumption usually takes place through practices aiming at recovering health, well-being and even productivity. Modern psychiatry and medicine usually rely on them as quick chemical fixing tools that are simply and safe to use in order to fight mental diseases and their symptoms. But also as tools that need specific behaviours from the patients to ensure compliance and therapeutic success.
Drawing on interviews with benzodiazepine and antidepressant users and ethnographic research in health care services in Montevideo, we focus on the way patients give meaning to their health recovery experience and how they interpret their trajectories as psychopharmaceutical users. We also trace how benzodiazepine and antidepressant users negotiate the limits and scope of psychopharmaceutical treatments with other practices and techniques for self-improvement and challenge the doctors biomedical views of self-transformation transforming themselves in this action. These processes take place through entanglements where psychopharmaceuticals, users, prescriptions, biomedical recommendation, alternative practices for self improvement, and so on, become self or a multiplicity of selves. drawing on sts studies, we understand the self as a transitory stabilization of relations and processes of the outer world.
The paper concludes that self-transformation narratives of psychopharmaceuticals users show a tension between a vision of the self as autonomous and self-sufficient and a vision of the self as psychopharmaceutical and healthcare dependant. Becoming a healthy person implies a permanent and creative negotiation over who the users are and which is the nature of their suffering.

Authors

• Andrea Clara Bielli, Universidad de la República

• Gabriela Lilián Bruno, Facultad de Psicología de la Udelar Uruguay

• Carolina Geneyro Saldombide, Universidad de la República (Uruguay)

• Santiago Navarro, Universidad de la República, Uruguay