How Prozac Became a Symbol of Biomedical Control and Storytelling Became an Act of Resistance

A new study published in Medical Humanities examines how memoir and metaphor reshape ideas of recovery in psychiatry. Researchers Swikriti Sanyal and Hemechandran Karah of the Indian Institute of Technology Madras analyze Prozac Diary, Lauren Slater’s 1998 memoir, to explore how figurative language challenges the psychiatric discourse on mental illness, medication, and normalcy.

By framing her experience with Prozac through metaphor, Slater resists the idea that recovery is simply a biomedical process. Instead, her memoir presents recovery as an active, rhetorical process—one that allows individuals to reclaim their experiences from psychiatric definitions of illness and health.

Prozac Diary introduces complexity and nuance to Slater’s relationship with Prozac, challenging the popular 90s narrative that the antidepressant “cures the chemical imbalances” of the brain in those with mental illness.

“By unraveling 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,” the authors write.

“We argue that in Prozac Diary, recovery does not merely imply a passive internalization of psychiatry’s biological determinism and its psychopharmaceutical approaches. Instead, it is a rhetorical process that enables the medicalized individuals to actively engage with the mental health system and interrogate the possibility of critically responding to its normative frameworks as agentic subjects.”

At the heart of the study is a critical interrogation of what it means to “recover”—and who gets to define it. Psychiatry has historically positioned recovery as a return to a pre-determined, functional state, often framed within a neoliberal logic of productivity and social conformity. In contrast, disability rights activists and service-user movements have long emphasized recovery as a process of self-determination, one that does not necessarily align with mainstream ideas of normalcy. Slater’s memoir, as Sanyal and Karah argue, resists the psychiatric model’s passive, compliance-driven version of recovery by engaging in an active, rhetorical redefinition of selfhood.