title: Fog of War: Psychopharmaceutical "Side Effects" and the United States Military.
abstract: The unprecedented reliance today on psychiatric drugs to maintain mission readiness in war and to treat veterans at home has been the subject of ethical debate in the United States. While acknowledging these debates, I advocate for an ethnography of how US soldiers and veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars themselves articulate political and ethical tensions in their experiences of psychiatric drug treatment. Detailing one army veteran's interpretations of drug effects as narrated through the lens of his current antiwar politics, I examine the radicalizing transformations of self and subjectivity that he attributes both to his witnessing drug use in Iraq and to the neurochemical effects of his own medications. Playing on the biomedical notion of "side effects," I highlight surprising political and ethical openings that can surface when psychopharmaceuticals and war intersect. Psychotropic medication use offers a critical realm for furthering the ethnographic study of the lived tensions and contradictions of military medicine and medicalization as revealed in militarized embodied experience.
authors.affiliation: a Department of Anthropology , University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill , Chapel Hill , North Carolina , USA.
authors.forename: Jocelyn Lim
authors.initials: JL
authors.lastname: Chua
mesh_terms: D055826:Afghan Campaign 2001-; D060432:Anthropology, Medical; D006801:Humans; D054542:Iraq War, 2003-2011; D008603:Mental Health; D008889:Military Personnel; D008890:Military Psychiatry; D011600:Psychopharmacology; D014481:United States; D058014:Veterans Health
keywords: Military psychiatry; US soldier and veteran mental health; psychopharmaceuticals; side effects; subjective experiences of psychiatric drug treatment