Psychiatry, bio-epistemes and the making of adolescence in southern Brazil

• Main Author: Dominique Pareja Béhague
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Fundação Oswaldo Cruz, Casa de Oswaldo Cruz
• Series: História, Ciências, Saúde: Manguinhos
• Subjects: Brazil; pharmaceuticals; bioreductionism; epistemology; history
• Online Access: http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0104-59702016000100131&lng=en&tlng=en

Abstract Drawing on an ethnographic study in southern Brazil, this paper explores how therapists’ attempts to “resist bioreductionist” pharmaceutical use both succeed and crumble. Using a comparative framing, I show that pharmaceuticalization can become an anesthetizing “lid” that interacts with young people’s polarizing micro-politics and is an outgrowth of multi-generational medico-political family histories. This lid, however, is not air-tight and exceptionalities are born out of these very same histories. I argue that both pharmaceuticalization and exceptions to it emerge not through “resistance” to biopsychiatric logics but from the transformative possibilities that the patterned co-production of social, political, and psychiatric life affords.