Writing Prozāk Diaries in Tehran: Generational Anomie and Psychiatric Subjectivities

Behrouzan, Orkideh

Abstract

I explore the historical and cultural shifts that underlie the normalization of the term de´pre´shen and the emergence of public psychiatric discourses in 1990s Iran. I do this by investigating the cultural sensibilities of a particular generation, the self-identified 1980s generation, and the ways they situate what is perceived as de´pre´shen in social anomie and the memories of the Iran–Iraq war. I argue that psychiatrization of psychological distress in Iran was not simply a de-politicizing hegemonic biomedical discourse, but that the contemporary Iranian discourses of psychological pathology and social loss evolved in public, hand-in-hand, through the medicalization of post-war loss. Psychiatric subjectivity describes conditions where individuals internalize psychiatry as a mode of thinking, and performatively articulate not only their desires, hopes, and anxieties, but also historical losses as embodied in individual and collective brains. I underscore my interlocutors’ simultaneous historicization and medicalization of their de´pre´shen, arguing that psychiatrically medicalized individuals are performative actors in the discursive formation of both biomedical and social truth. De´pre´shen, in the larger sense of the word, has become one way to navigate ruptured pasts, slippery presents, and uncertain futures.

Citation

Behrouzan, O. (2015). Writing Prozāk Diaries in Tehran: Generational Anomie and Psychiatric Subjectivities. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 39(3), 399-426. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-014-9425-4

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Oct 1, 2014
• Online Publication Date: Mar 8, 2015
• Publication Date: Mar 8, 2015
• Deposit Date: Sep 18, 2018
• Publicly Available Date: Mar 9, 2115
• Journal: Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry.
• Print ISSN: 0165-005X
• Electronic ISSN: 1573-076X
• Publisher: Springer
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 39
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 399-426
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-014-9425-4