Prozak Diaries - by Orkideh Behrouzan (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Prozak Diaries is an analysis of emerging psychiatric discourses in post-1980s Iran. It examines a cultural shift in how people interpret and express their feeling states, by adopting the language of psychiatry, and shows how experiences that were once articulated in the richly layered poetics of the Persian language became, by the 1990s, part of a clinical discourse on mood and affect. In asking how psychiatric dialect becomes a language of everyday, the book analyzes cultural forms created by this clinical discourse, exploring individual, professional, and generational cultures of medicalization in various sites from clinical encounters and psychiatric training, to intimate interviews, works of art and media, and Persian blogs. Through the lens of psychiatry, the book reveals how historical experiences are negotiated and how generations are formed.

Orkideh Behrouzan traces the historical circumstances that prompted the development of psychiatric discourses in Iran and reveals the ways in which they both reflect and actively shape Iranians' cultural sensibilities. A physician and an anthropologist, she combines clinical and anthropological perspectives in order to investigate the gray areas between memory and everyday life, between individual symptoms and generational remembering. Prozak Diaries offers an exploration of language as experience. In interpreting clinical and generational narratives, Behrouzan writes not only a history of psychiatry in contemporary Iran, but a story of how stories are told.

Review Quotes

"Prozak Diaries is a brilliant analysis of psychological remembering and cultural reworking, the domestication of neuropsychiatry and pharmaceutical treatments of depreshen, and the structure of feelings of a generation expressed through blogs, literary productions, and self-reflection."--Byron Good "Professor of Medical Anthropology, Harvard Medical School, and editor of Culture and PTSD: Trauma in Global and Historical Perspective"

"A richly textured ethnographic and historical study of how languages and practices of 'sciences of the soul'--including psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis--have traveled to and in Iran, and what contemporary cultural work they perform. Full of brilliant unexpected insights, this is an indispensable text for understanding today's Iran."--Afsaneh Najmabadi "Harvard University"

"Behrouzan blends deep historical insights that are indigenous to the region with "imports" and insights that were as relevant in 9th and 10th centuries are they are today. She blends English and Persian. She blends biomedical and poetic language, cultural and political references... By any standard, Prozak Diaries is meticulously crafted and exceptionally well-executed. Behrouzan's medical training, deep historical perspective, cultural analysis, and careful ethnographic writing illuminate a way of thinking about the Middle East that is often lacking. [This book] should be considered an invaluable ethnography for all medical students, medical and psychological anthropologists, those interested psychoanalytic theory, and those studying the Middle East, Central Asia, or the Muslim World in general."--Dina Omar "Somatosphere"

"Behrouzan's subtle and sophisticated critique of the opposing trends within Iranian psychiatry redirects the discussion into the already existing channels of communication between neuropsychiatric, psychodynamic and anthropological approaches. Her book should prove very suitable reading for academic teaching across a wide range of university disciplines - not least of all social anthropology - and will make for fascinating and inspiring literature for any interested reader with a moderate degree of specialist knowledge in navigating the borderlands between psychiatry and social anthropology."--Arne S. Steinforth "Anthropologica"

"Orkideh Behrouzan's Prozāk Diaries is a formidable undertaking that elegantly recounts the generational shift in how young Iranians talk about and experience their post-revolutionary and postwar experiences....The book is written in fluid prose and possesses a clear narrative arc. One of the strengths of this book is Behrouzan's literary sensibility, through which she interlaces ethnographic descriptions with analyses of aesthetic works, literature, poetry, and music....Prozāk Diaries should have a broad and varied readership. As a scholarly book, it will be attractive not only to students of Iranian studies, but also anthropology, medical and sociocultural, as well as those working in Medicine, especially Psychiatry, and Science and Technology. Prozāk Diaries should also be read widely by non-academics interested in depression, postwar trauma, medical histories, and, of course, contemporary Iran."--Arzoo Osanloo "Iranian Studies"

"Orkideh Behrouzan's Prozak Diaries provides an ethnographically rich and theoretically embedded entry into the ever-shifting post-revolutionary Iranian milieuThe book is enriched by vigorous research and extensive native knowledgeProzak Diaries makes an invaluable contribution to medical and sociocultural anthropology, as well as scholarship on memory, trauma, and Iran. Behrouzan's beautiful writing, free from jargon, renders it accessible to both experts and lay educated readers."--Shahla Talebi "Medical Anthropology Quarterly"

"Starting the story in the 1930s when the foundations of modern Iranian psychiatry were established in what became the famed Ruzbeh Hospital in Tehran, Behrouzan provides a much-needed, comprehensive overview of the development of the field...Behrouzan's timely book is very important in the fields of anthropology and Middle East Studies because it makes significant interventions on key questions of generational formations, biomedical discourses, and the everyday lived experiences of feeling states."--Narges Bajoghli "Anthropological Quarterly"

"The book is written gracefully, offering a rich and elegant ethnographic approach to the matter of subjectivities by analyzing the rise and normalization of psychiatric discourses in post 1980s Iran...Overall, this book provides a wonderful account of how historical and cultural circumstances can produce a generational mark with deep psychological implications. But even more, the book is a lucid and beautifully written example of how people, in their everyday lives, actively manage to continue being alive and making sense of their past and their present."--Sebastian Rojas Navarro "Ethos"

"The book will interest doctors at all levels of training, especially those interested in cross-cultural, historical and political aspects of psychiatry. As a UK-trained Iranian psychiatrist, and an immigrant of the 1980s generation, I specially related to Prozak Diaries. The book is a valuable adjunct in assisting the management of patients affected by the recent Middle Eastern conflicts."-- "Cyrus Abbasian, The British Journal of Psychiatry"

"This remarkable book reveals the myriad of ways in which a popularized medical discourse, artistic expression, and psychological metaphor have been intertwined to permit people to speak about how they feel. Only Orkideh Behrouzan, a scholar conversant in these several disciplines and deeply steeped in Persian culture, could trace this interpretive pattern--one that will be of deep interest to those who study war, social resilience, and the work of memory."--Jennifer Leaning "Harvard School of Public Health"

"With the exquisite literary sensibility of a writer and the analytical astuteness of a scientist, Orkideh Behrouzan has written an exceptional book that brings the experiences of psychiatry and individuals' need for improvisation in an uncertain world alive to the reader. Navigating between the experiences of different generations of Iranians, this book provides one of the most compelling accounts I have read of how historical and psychological experiences fold and refold into everyday life. In its execution of this difficult project, the book breaks all boundaries between disciplines, and between expert knowledge and lay knowledge. A splendid achievement."--Veena Das "Johns Hopkins University"

About the Author

Orkideh Behrouzan is Assistant Professor at SOAS University of London, and a 2015-16 Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies. She is the winner of the 2011 Kerr Award from the Middle Eastern Studies Association.