Prozac as medicine, metaphor and identity: reimagining recovery as a rhetorical process in Lauren Slater's Prozac Diary.

Abstract

This paper examines Lauren Slater's memoir, Prozac Diary, to understand the role of language in reimagining the notion of recovery. Written from the standpoint of a consumer of antidepressant drugs, Prozac Diary underlines the pervasiveness of professional psychiatry's pathologising practices and its psychopharmacological interventions in the 90s in the USA. Moreover, it unpacks the nuances of the relationship between the person and the pill at the intersections of myriad medical and socio-cultural discourses. Reading the memoir from the perspectives of disability studies scholars such as Kimberly E. Emmons and Lennard J. Davis, we argue that Slater's use of figurative language to critically engage with the Prozac discourse is a rhetorical act of self-care. Furthermore, we contend that by normalising illness and challenging the ableist assumptions of normalcy, Slater also invests in rhetorical care of the collective self/bodymind.This paper demonstrates how through a metaphorical representation of Prozac, Slater questions the predominant mental health discourses that construct the meanings of 'illness' and 'health' and shape illness and health-based identities. Simultaneously, through her dialogical negotiations with the Prozac discourse to reconstitute a complex health identity, she raises fundamental questions about the existence of a 'core', 'authentic', 'healthy', pre-Prozac selfhood that the drug claims to restore. Therefore, by unravelling the intrapersonal, socio-cultural and discursive ramifications of recovery, as opposed to psychiatry's perfunctory understanding of biological cure as a restoration of a socially desirable state of 'normalcy', she is able to reclaim the lived experience of recovery. We argue that in Prozac Diary, recovery does not merely imply a passive internalisation of psychiatry's biological determinism and its psychopharmaceutical approaches. Instead, it is a rhetorical process that enables the medicalised individuals to actively engage with the mental health system and interrogate the possibility of critically responding to its normative frameworks as agentic subjects.