Naomi Zucker

This research explores the contemporary life of psychiatric medication through the lens of drug discontinuation and deprescribing. In the wake of massive psychopharmaceutical uptake and increasingly pervasive and long-term psychotropic drug use, and with little robust evidence about either the long-terms effects of continuing medication or the challenges and risks of stopping it, this project investigates how people are living with, coming off, and managing life after psychiatric drugs, as well as the broader landscape of psychiatric knowledge, practice, and care that such experiences illuminate. Through twelve months of digital fieldwork with researchers, prescribers, and the online psychiatric drug withdrawal community of people with lived experience taking and stopping medication, this research examines how the problem of withdrawal (and its invisibility within mainstream psychiatry) affects clinical care, drug research, and psychiatric commonsense. Directing ethnographic attention to psychiatric subjectivity, pharmaceutical embodiment, and emerging networks of lay expertise, mutual support, and patient-activism, this work sheds light on the fault lines and ambivalences of contemporary biomedical psychiatry and the struggle for recognition over what counts as illness, harm, or healing. As the “wonder” of these wonder drugs has begun to wear thin, this research charts the intimate and scientific afterlives of psychopharmaceuticalization.