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General Anthropology Division
Group Flash Presentation Session
Ellen Rubinstein
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
North Dakota State University
Parents often become the mediators through which children with mental illness gain access to psychiatric medications. These medications, especially mind-altering antipsychotics, remain a controversial mode of proffering care, as they can seem to cause more harm than good. Taking parental ambivalence with pharmaceutics in Japan as its starting point, this presentation explores how medication situates itself materially and imaginatively in everyday family life, legitimating certain caring practices while occluding or denying others. As such, medication becomes a potent social actor in a complex assemblage of psychiatric technologies, pharmaceutical selves, and parental practices of care.