Prozak Diaries: Psychiatry and Generational Memory in Iran

Prozak Diaries offers a nuanced ethnographic examination of how psychiatric disease categories and their pharmaceutical treatments have been culturally assimilated in Iran, yielding new forms of being and, crucially, new modes of sociality. As the Persian transliteration of Prozac in the book’s title suggests, the global rise of biomedical psychiatry cannot explain the regionally and historically specific lived experience of mental illness. Proposing an alternative to top-down research methods that Orkideh Behrouzan groups under the rubric of “post-Foucauldian” cultural critique, Prozak Diaries investigates the personal narratives of people living with depression and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), as well as the clinicians working to understand and treat these conditions. Behrouzan brings together testimonies from interviews, blogs, and artistic productions to argue that depression and ADHD have informed “psychiatric subjectivities” mediated by affective attachments to postrevolutionary generational identities in...