Is It Me or My Brain? Depression and Neuroscientific Facts

Journal of Medical Humanities 24 (1/2):35-47 (2003)
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Abstract

This article considers the roles played by brain images (e.g., from PET scans) in mass media as experienced by people suffering from mental illness, and as used by scientists and activist groups in demonstrating a biological basis for mental illness. Examining the rhetorical presentation of images in magazines and books, the article describes the persuasive power that brain images have in altering the understanding people have of their own body—their objective self. Analyzing first-person accounts of encounters with brain images, it argues that people come to understand themselves as having neurotransmitter imbalances that are the cause of their illnesses via received facts and images of the brain, but that this understanding is incomplete and in tension with the sense that they are their brain. The article concludes by querying the emergence of a pharmaceutical self, in which one experiences one's brain as if on drugs, as a new form of objective self-fashioning

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Citations of this work

Brainhood, anthropological figure of modernity.Fernando Vidal - 2009 - History of the Human Sciences 22 (1):5-36.
Stigma and the politics of biomedical models of mental illness.Angela K. Thachuk - 2011 - International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 4 (1):140-163.
Stigma and Addiction: Being and Becoming.Daniel Buchman & Peter Reiner - 2009 - American Journal of Bioethics 9 (9):18-19.

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References found in this work

Signs.Maurice Merleau-Ponty - 2018 - Chiasmi International 20:231-231.
A grammar of motives.Kenneth Burke - 1945 - Berkeley,: University of California Press.
Modes of thought.Alfred North Whitehead - 1938 - New York,: Capricorn Books.

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