Book Review: Stefan Ecks, Eating Drugs: Psychopharmaceutical Pluralism in India

The dominance of psychiatric practice in India and the relatively obscured homeopathic and Ayurvedic practices are the major issues explicated in Ecks’ Eating Drugs: Psychopharmaceutical Pluralism in India. Overcoming patients’ resistance to compliance is a major task of the Kolkata psychiatrists interviewed by Ecks, and they sought to deal with this by positing drugs as ‘mind food’. Ayurveda and homeopathy are also gradually sidelining their own philosophies and falling in line with biomedicine with respect to commodification and marketing of drugs. The biopolitics involved in the rising mood disorders in India and the concomitant increase in the prescription of mood medications is evidenced by the propagation of a ‘global monoculture of happiness’ by pharmaceutical companies, who instil the notion that pills have solutions to all social ills.