“the Magic Pill” - Reflections on a Psychiatric Panacea

“I have been mad enough to study reason; I was reasonable enough to study madness” (Michel Foucault)

My desperation to take away the constant pain of living with schizoaffective disorder legitimises and empowers my faith in biomedicine and its psychiatric science, hoping that there is a “magic pill” to cure me, a panacea for mental ill-health. I am subject to the powered space, manifestations and ramifications of the reason and power of psychiatry.

Part of the human experience includes reason and faith and power and pain, and these can be translatable and understood as per relative variable social and cultural contexts. An example of a cultural experience of Madness, that I will examine, is within the hegemonic Western psy-science space, whose biomedical activity is constructed not as a procedure or as a set of principles but as a culture (Latour and Woolgar 2013).

Psychiatry - its science, its reason, its values, its perceived validating measurements, its treatment can be understood as cultural artefacts of psychiatry; ‘magical’ cultural artefacts, such as the treatment of the ‘Magic Pill’. The Magic Pill is an esteemed cultural artefact of psychiatry. Part of the magic of psychiatry can manifest as a hope, allure, belief, and possibly a deception – not offering a panacea after all. The Magic Pill has been developed and augmented over the history of the hegemonic Western psy-science space, within which the phenomena of Madness have been determined, inaugurated, instituted, and intellectualised. Foucault further explains how Madness can be viewed as a factor of biopower (Cisney & Morar 2020)

I will use the method of the “sacred” narrative (Hendry 2009), providing a lens of lived/living experience to understand the magic of psychiatry and the faith we have in it, demonstrated by a discussion of psychiatry’s cultural artefacts.