Antidepressants

This chapter reassesses the feminist and critical claims that, after Prozac, pills have come to play too prominent a part in the treatment of depression. The chapter looks in detail at the pharmacokinetic characteristics of antidepressants: how they are physiologically absorbed, distributed, metabolized, and excreted. The chapter begins by tracking the way in which antidepressant medications are metabolized in human bodies—taking the gut as an important biological and political reference point. The chapter argues that the pharmacokinetics of ssris are more conceptually and politically engaging than the feminist, critical, and clinical literatures have assumed. Using the psychoanalytic concept of transference, this chapter aims to move critical attention beyond the cns synapses where antidepressants are supposed to be most potent, and thus expand the so-called serotonin hypothesis of depression to include the gut.