Review of Chemically Imbalanced: Everyday Suffering, Medication, and Our Troubled Quest for Self-Mastery

Abstract

Joseph E. Davis’s Chemically Imbalanced: Everyday Suffering, Medication, and Our Troubled Quest for Self-Mastery advances the knowledge on medicalization by providing a nuanced discussion of what Davis calls “everyday suffering.” As they seek treatment and an explanation for their troubles, Davis argues, people often “engage with the new and psychologically depthless talk of neurobiology.” That is, they shift their thinking to a “new ‘imaginary’” that typically involves moving from a “psychologizing” to a “medicalizing” or biomedical interpretation of their symptoms and experiences; this entails attributing their feelings and symptoms to neurochemicals and heredity rather than explaining them in more complex, psychological terms.