Chemically Imbalanced: Everyday Suffering, Medication, and Our Troubled Quest for Self-Mastery

by Joseph E. Davis

A study of how ordinary people deal with everyday problems through self-mastery and mental health care practices.Everyday suffering—those conditions or feelings brought on by trying circumstances that arise in everyone’s lives—is something that humans have grappled with for millennia. But the last decades have seen a drastic change in the way we approach it. In the past, a person going through a time of difficulty might keep a journal or see a therapist, but now the psychological has been replaced by the instead of treating the heart, soul, and mind, we take a pill to treat the brain.Chemically Imbalanced is a field report on how ordinary people dealing with common problems explain their suffering, how they’re increasingly turning to the thin and mechanistic language of the “body/brain,” and what these encounters might tell us. Drawing on interviews with people dealing with struggles such as underperformance in school or work, grief after the end of a relationship, or disappointment with how their life is unfolding, Joseph E. Davis reveals the profound revolution in consciousness that is underway. We now see suffering as an imbalance in the brain that needs to be fixed, usually through chemical means. This has rippled into our social and cultural conversations, and it has affected how we, as a society, imagine ourselves and envision what constitutes a good life. Davis warns that what we envision as a neurological revolution, in which suffering is a mechanistic problem, has troubling and entrapping consequences. And he makes the case that by turning away from an interpretive, meaning-making view of ourselves, we thwart our chances to enrich our souls and learn important truths about ourselves and the social conditions under which we live.Praise for Chemically Imbalanced“Chemically Imbalanced is an excellent addition to the works in social sciences and humanities that examine the distress of ordinary Americans from the second half of the twentieth century onward, a period when commercialized pills and the psychology-based notion of self-improvement entered the minds of Americans.” —Metascience“Chemically Imbalanced raises important questions, offers new insight into the power and reach of the biomedical model and neurobiological thinking, and I highly recommend it. I encourage readers to assign it, especially in graduate-level mental health and illness classes—or any class looking for a discussion on people’s experiences with suffering and the broad impacts of biomedical thinking and treatment.” —Social Forces

256 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 10, 2020

Reviews

[Cal Davie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fantastic reflection on the popular understanding of placing mental challenges into a biomedical framework. Davis is careful not to include Serious Mental Illness in his analysis, he's a serious scholar rather than a dogmatic antipsychiatry campaigner. Often conversations on mental health haven't adequately addressed how these issues are currently understood on a popular level, Davis very thoughtfully analyses popular understanding, using a range of interviews as examples. It's a very rich book with a lot to offer in how we understand how to navigate the struggles and sufferings of life and the murky waters that distinguish that from mental illness.