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The Sedated Society pp 189–225Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Political Pills: Psychopharmaceuticals and Neoliberalism as Mutually Supporting

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Abstract

This chapter argues that a core explanatory variable in the spread of psychopharmaceuticals has been the ability of such products since the 1980s to serve key aims of the neoliberal political economy. Thus to understand the expansion of psychopharmaceutical consumption since the 1980s, we must go beyond the machinations of the pharmaceutical industry and psychiatric profession, to inspect the deeper neoliberal interests, aims and logics to which both profession and industry have been responsive and beholden. Psychopharmaceuticals, in other words, have enjoyed rapid ascent by being configured as consistent with key neoliberal aims of increasing ‘labour productivity’ and of furthering ‘commodification’ while themselves benefitting from ‘deregulation’. While reform of psychiatric and pharmaceutical practices certainly is long overdue, unless political will grows sufficiently to tackle systemic corruptions and excesses in the research, regulation and distribution of psychopharmaceuticals, little may transpire in the form of tangible change.

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    James Davies

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    James Davies

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Davies, J. (2017). Political Pills: Psychopharmaceuticals and Neoliberalism as Mutually Supporting. In: Davies, J. (eds) The Sedated Society. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44911-1_8

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