Abstract

A growing number of social critics have raised concerns about the widespread use of prescription antidepressants in our culture. I argue that these critics are too quick to dismiss the liberatory possibilities of psychotropic drug therapies, particularly with regard to the use of antidepressants. Although a full accounting of the impact of antidepressants on our society and its citizens does not exist, we must not underestimate or too quickly dismiss the transformative possibilities of restoring or enhancing individual capabilities. Antidepressants can have a restorative and enhancing effect upon an individual’s perception of – and presence in – the world. For some, this strengthened sense of self is a necessary condition for a stronger sense of agency in that world. Antidepressant therapy can also restore one’s social vitality and sense of belonging in the world; this would seem to be a necessary condition to empower citizens to critically and vigilantly resist unjust social arrangements. In this essay, I analyze and assess what I take to be the two strongest objections to the use of antidepressants: first, that their use promotes a personal quietism, disconnecting individuals from vital cognitive and emotional affects; second, that such chemical alteration induces a social quietism, and so complicity with suspect norms and values embedded in dominant American ideology. In the third section, I draw attention to the bond between the struggle for social justice and the transformation of the self embedded within a community: a transformation which for some persons may simply not be possible for the individual to bring about or maintain without neurological modification of the self