Lewis, Bradley. Moving Beyond Prozac, DSM, and the New Psychiatry: the Birth of Postpsychiatry
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Lewis, Bradley. Moving Beyond Prozac, DSM, and the New Psychiatry: The Birth of Postpsychiatry. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.93209. Accessed 1 Nov 2020. Downloaded on behalf of University of Pennsylvania Moving Beyond Prozac, DSM, & the New Psychiatry Lewis, Bradley. Moving Beyond Prozac, DSM, and the New Psychiatry: The Birth of Postpsychiatry. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.93209. Accessed 1 Nov 2020. Downloaded on behalf of University of Pennsylvania CoRpoRealities: Discourses of Disability David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, editors Books available in the series: “Defects”: Engendering the Modern Body edited by Helen Deutsch and Felicity Nussbaum Revels in Madness: Insanity in Medicine and Literature by Allen Thiher Points of Contact: Disability, Art, and Culture edited by Susan Crutchfield and Marcy Epstein A History of Disability by Henri-Jacques Stiker Disabled Veterans in History edited by David A. Gerber Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse by David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder Backlash Against the ADA: Reinterpreting Disability Rights edited by Linda Hamilton Krieger The Staff of Oedipus: Transforming Disability in Ancient Greece by Martha L. Rose Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture by Martha Stoddard Holmes Foucault and the Government of Disability edited by Shelley Tremain Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance edited by Carrie Sandahl and Philip Auslander Moving Beyond Prozac, DSM, and the New Psychiatry: The Birth of Postpsychiatry by Bradley Lewis Lewis, Bradley. Moving Beyond Prozac, DSM, and the New Psychiatry: The Birth of Postpsychiatry. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.93209. Accessed 1 Nov 2020. Downloaded on behalf of University of Pennsylvania Moving Beyond Prozac, DSM, & the New Psychiatry The Birth of Postpsychiatry bradley lewis the university of michigan press Ann Arbor Lewis, Bradley. Moving Beyond Prozac, DSM, and the New Psychiatry: The Birth of Postpsychiatry. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.93209. Accessed 1 Nov 2020. Downloaded on behalf of University of Pennsylvania Copyright © by the University of Michigan 2006 All rights reserved Published in the United States of America by The University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America c Printed on acid-free paper 2009 2008 2007 2006 4321 No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher. A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lewis, Bradley, 1956– Moving beyond Prozac, DSM, and the new psychiatry : the birth of postpsychiatry / Bradley Lewis. p. ; cm. — (Corporealities) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-472-11464-1 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-472-11464-6 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-472-03117-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-472-03117-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Psychiatry—Methodology. 2. Psychiatry and the humanities. 3. Humanities. I. Title. II. Series. [DNLM: 1. Psychiatry. 2. Humanities. 3. Interdisciplinary Communication. 4. Social Sciences. WM 100 L673m 2006] RC437.5.L49 2006 616.89—dc22 2005020756 ISBN13 978-0-472-02575-6 (electronic) Lewis, Bradley. Moving Beyond Prozac, DSM, and the New Psychiatry: The Birth of Postpsychiatry. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.93209. Accessed 1 Nov 2020. Downloaded on behalf of University of Pennsylvania Acknowledgments I am grateful to those many people who supported this book. Peter Caws, Stacy Wolf, and Mel Alexanderwitz provided the invaluable mentoring and support that enabled my early scholarship in the humanities. I am also greatly in debt to the kind and critical readership I received from Joanne Rendell, LeAnn Fields, Lennard Davis, Delese Wear, Marshall Alcorn, Gail Weiss, Barbara Miller, Jane Flax, James Grif‹n, Emily Mar- tin, Suzanne Barnard, David DeGrazia, Andy Altman, Linda Morrison, Benny Rendell, Lisa Parker, Ken Thompson, Felice Aull, David Mitchell, Sharon Snyder, and Clair James. Finally, I would like to thank my col- leagues and students over the years, most recently at New York Univer- sity’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, for helping me work through and rehearse these many ideas. I would also like to acknowledge the Journal of Medical Humanities, where earlier versions of chapters 5 and 7 were published. Lewis, Bradley. Moving Beyond Prozac, DSM, and the New Psychiatry: The Birth of Postpsychiatry. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.93209. Accessed 1 Nov 2020. Downloaded on behalf of University of Pennsylvania Lewis, Bradley. Moving Beyond Prozac, DSM, and the New Psychiatry: The Birth of Postpsychiatry. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.93209. Accessed 1 Nov 2020. Downloaded on behalf of University of Pennsylvania Contents Preface ix Chapter One. Theorizing Psychiatry 1 Chapter Two. Dodging the Science Wars: A Theoretical Third Way 18 Chapter Three. The New Psychiatry as a Discursive Practice 38 Chapter Four. Psychiatry and Postmodern Theory 61 Chapter Five. Postdisciplinary Coalitions and Alignments 80 Chapter Six. Decoding DSM: Bad Science, Bad Rhetoric, Bad Politics 97 Chapter Seven. Prozac and the Posthuman Politics of Cyborgs 121 Chapter Eight. Postempiricism: Imagining a Successor Science for Psychiatry 143 Epilogue. Postpsychiatry Today 165 Notes 173 References 183 Index 195 Lewis, Bradley. Moving Beyond Prozac, DSM, and the New Psychiatry: The Birth of Postpsychiatry. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.93209. Accessed 1 Nov 2020. Downloaded on behalf of University of Pennsylvania Lewis, Bradley. Moving Beyond Prozac, DSM, and the New Psychiatry: The Birth of Postpsychiatry. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.93209. Accessed 1 Nov 2020. Downloaded on behalf of University of Pennsylvania Preface For an array of historical and political reasons, contemporary psychia- try—what some call the “new psychiatry”—relentlessly champions sci- ence as its primary form of inquiry. This preference for science—the rhetoric of science, the methods of science, the company of scientists— cuts psychiatry off from the humanities, the arts, and the rest of intellec- tual thought. Psychiatry isolated from other human inquiries may map our brains or chart our neurotransmitters, but it becomes woefully inad- equate for understanding our deepest human concerns. Narrowly spe- cialized approaches to psychiatry have little hope of understanding the fullness of human desire, purpose, and suffering. And they have no hope of understanding the cultural contexts and political struggles that form the inescapable horizons of psychic life. This book develops the theoretical tools and scholarly interchanges needed to address this imbalance. I write as a hybrid academic who trained in medicine and psychiatry before going back for a Ph.D. in the humanities and social theory. Here, employing recent theoretical work in the humanities to theorize contemporary psychiatry, I bring the two sides of my training together. My goal in bringing the two sides of my training—in effect, the two sides of campus—together is to provide an alternative vision for psychia- try. Throughout this book, I employ the term postpsychiatry when refer- ring to that alternative vision. The term was coined by two U.K. psychia- trists, Patrick Bracken and Philip Thomas, who like me are members of the Critical Psychiatry Network and part of an increasing chorus of peo- ple concerned with the reductionism of contemporary psychiatry.1 Bracken and Thomas introduced the term to a wide audience in their British Medical Journal article “Postpsychiatry: A New Direction for Mental Health.” In this article, they critique the modernist agenda in psychiatry Lewis, Bradley. Moving Beyond Prozac, DSM, and the New Psychiatry: The Birth of Postpsychiatry. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.93209. Accessed 1 Nov 2020. Downloaded on behalf of University of Pennsylvania x Preface and outline a “new positive direction for theory and practice in mental health” (2001, 724). They draw from recent theoretical work in the humanities to question modern psychiatry’s Enlightenment legacy, par- ticularly its preoccupations with science, universal truth, the individual subject, and one-sided notions of progress and advancement. This vision of postpsychiatry does not reject or negate current psychi- atry. Postpsychiatry is not a nostalgic return to psychoanalysis nor a radi- cal antipsychiatry critique of mental illness as a myth. Rather, postpsy- chiatry moves the discussion forward by adding theoretical analysis of the many tensions within psychiatry and by opening psychiatry to alter- native scholarly perspectives. That said, however, while postpsychiatry does not reject psychiatry, it does seriously shift the emphasis. Contemporary psychiatry tends to focus on neurochemical and genetic explanations, to place technological solutions over ethical and