Editorial: From Amrita to Substance D: Psychopharmacology, Political Economy, and Technologies of the Self

In this issue of Transcultural Psychiatry, we present papers from the 9th Annual Advanced Study Institute in Cultural Psychiatry, ‘Psychopharmacology in a Globalizing World,’ which took place in Montreal, June 12–15, 2007. Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in the use of psychiatric medications among children, adolescents, and adults in many countries. Psychopharmaceuticals are big business and are at the center of the globalization of psychiatry. Psychiatric knowledge and practice as well as the experience of patients taking medication are shaped by the interests of pharmaceutical companies and by wider social and cultural attitudes toward medication. This meeting brought together scholars from health and social sciences to examine the cultural shaping and consequences of the use of psychiatric medications. Presentations addressed marketing and the political economy of psychopharmacology, the production of scientific ‘evidence’ and professional practices, the medical and nonmedical uses of medications, popular attitudes toward medication, and phenomenological pharmacology. Medications can be said to have social lives in several senses. They are important commodities, widely consumed and generating huge profits for multinational corporations. This consumption is fostered by active marketing, spurred on by changes in popular culture that promote the use of medications to manage both psychiatric disorders and milder forms of distress. Psychiatric practitioners and institutions contribute to this