9781501341946: Pill: Object Lessons

Inhaltsangabe

Pill is a counter-intuitive cultural history of psychiatric medications. Turning the issue of mental illness upside down, it focuses not on mental illnesses themselves but on the objects, the simple pills, that profoundly alter the course of our lives-1mg, 5mg, or 300mg at a time-often in ways that we only dimly perceive.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Robert Bennett is Professor of English at Montana State University, USA.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. 'You are what you eat.' Never is this truer than when we use medications, from beta blockers and aspirin to Viagra and epidurals-and especially psychotropic pills that transform our minds as well as our bodies. Meditating on how modern medicine increasingly measures out human identity not in T. S. Eliot's proverbial coffee spoons but in 1mg-, 5mg-, or 300mg-doses, Pill traces the uncanny presence of psychiatric pills through science, medicine, autobiography, television, cinema, literature, and popular music. Robert Bennett reveals modern psychopharmacology to be a brave new world in which human identities- thoughts, emotions, personalities, and selves themselves-are increasingly determined by the extraordinary powers of seemingly ordinary pills. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

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