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Nootropics in the Era of Affective Capitalism: Drug Consumption and Discourse Effects

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Latin American Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Bioethics and Disabilities

Part of the book series: The International Library of Bioethics ((ILB,volume 102))

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Abstract

This chapter discusses the transmutation of meaning from psychotropic to nootropic (drugs for cognitive enhancement) as a constituent element of the era of affective capitalism; a moment in which the public sphere is filled with problems of the private space. This change occurs at the moment in which the pharmaceutical industry gains muscles and actively participates in the training space of psychiatric professionals; one of the characteristics of the process that Lakoff names as pharmaceutical reason. To illustrate aspects of this new moment we bring data from interviews with undergraduate and graduate students who consume psychotropic drugs in the expectation of cognitive improvement. Although it seems unethical to medicalize people who are not sick, when these drugs are elevated to the condition of nootropics, the reasoning is inverted: it seems desirable and ethical to give citizens the opportunity for cognitive improvement, as a way to guarantee competitiveness in the neoliberal society. As important as talking about the effects of the increased use of psychotropic drugs in today’s society is to observe the effects of the discourses that put these drugs in circulation in the market under the nootropic label.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Cognitive enhancement can be defined as the use of medication and/or other means with the aim of improving the cognitive functions of healthy subjects, especially memory, attention, creativity and intelligence in the absence of any medical indication (Brzozowski and Daré 2021, p. 205).

  2. 2.

    The history of the psychotropic industry is not the focus of this chapter. To learn more about the subject and how psychotropics were first used as anti-allergic formulas for after spraying as a medicine that acts to calm soldiers in the Korean and Vietnam wars and how these formulas are born from small laboratories and are appropriate by pharmaceutical industry giants and are normalized as an alternative to alter unwanted behaviours and more recently to provoke desired behaviours and states of consciousness see: Healy 2002, Aguiar and Ortega 2017; Whitaker 2017; Caponi 2019.

  3. 3.

    Although this psychiatry is named as biological, it is not linked to any discovery of the biological origin of mental disorders (Aguiar and Ortega 2017: 890). In 2002, in the preparation of the fifth edition of the DSM, this situation had not changed (Aguiar and Ortega 2017: 891).

  4. 4.

    The work of Latour and Woolgar (1997) questions the scientific notion of “discovery”, which presupposes the natural data; the authors show how the production and construction of the scientific fact according to repeated practices in a laboratory. Scientific reality is a consequence and not a cause; it is produced and not discovered, although scientists insist on making the fact a given (Corbanezi 2021:40).

  5. 5.

    Before it was just a diagnostics book like any other previously existing. There was no unity in mental health diagnoses; each organization, institution or association had its own reference manual (Frances 2016).

  6. 6.

    The Psychic Suffering project among UFSC students investigated aspects of psychic suffering among undergraduate and graduate students. The first stage involved self-administered questionnaires (Caponi et al. 2021). The objective was to investigate factors associated with psychological distress in university students. The second qualitative stage invited the participants of the first stage for an interview. There were 38 interviews recorded by zoom. The first stage had the participation of a total of 1621 undergraduate and graduate students. The project was submitted and approved by the Ethics Committee for Research with Human Beings (CEP) of UFSC, CAAE number: 4,252,516.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Municipality of Florianópolis, Florianópolis, SC, Brazil

    Fabíola Stolf Brzozowski

  2. Federal University of Santa Catarina, Florianópolis, SC, Brazil

    Marcia da Silva Mazon

Authors
  1. Fabíola Stolf Brzozowski
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  2. Marcia da Silva Mazon
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Legal Theory, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

    Ana Paula Barbosa-Fohrmann

  2. Department of Sociology and Political Science, Federal University of Santa Catarina, Florianópolis, Santa Catarina, Brazil

    Sandra Caponi

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Brzozowski, F.S., da Silva Mazon, M. (2023). Nootropics in the Era of Affective Capitalism: Drug Consumption and Discourse Effects. In: Barbosa-Fohrmann, A.P., Caponi, S. (eds) Latin American Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Bioethics and Disabilities. The International Library of Bioethics, vol 102. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22891-9_7

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