What do the SSRI pills do? Users experiences of antidepressants at the crossroads of bodies, minds and medicine

This paper explores the experiences of users of SSRIs, the antidepressants that were launched in late 1980s and early 1990s. The focus is on the experiences and understandings of how the pills work, from the users’ perspective, put in dialogue with current theorizations of the body and the mind.

The starting point is the tensions that understandings of depressions opens, as it is on the one hand a psychiatric/psychological/mind problem, on the other that it is diagnosed and recognized to a large extent through bodily signs and behaviors, such as not eating, not sleeping, crying. It is also today mainly a problem that is treated by SSRIs/pills, with the popularized idea that SSRIs work through changing the body, the chemical balance in the brain. Theoretically I will draw on Nikolas Rose’s conceptualization of the Neurochemical self, as well as Elizabeth Wilson’s effort to build models that opens up for interactions and fluidity between mind, brain and body. Through the interviews I will tentatively explore how the body and biology figures in the experiences of the users of SSRI.

Analytically I will suggest that even when users’ experience the drugs to work, their experience is characterized by instability, uncertainty and unpredictability. This in relation to how the pills work, if they work, if something has changed, and what has changed, as well as why change has occurred. The imagined clarity of biological explanations are nowhere to be seen.

Finally I will make an effort to place the experiences of the users in a wider societal context: what kind of subjects are they becoming and how does that relate to normality and pathology?

My study is part of the larger project AFTER THE SUCCESS WITH THE NEW GENERATION ANTIDEPRESSANTS: EXPERIENCES, PRACTICES, DISCOURSES AND CHANGES OF THE SELF.