Are Psychiatric Drugs Remaking Our Emotional Landscape?

Psychiatry frames unusual or extreme emotional experiences as internal dysfunctions rather than responses to complex social and environmental factors. Recent work has argued that this perpetuates a form of “affective injustice” that fosters sanism; while various scholars have argued that this framing process itself – also referred to as psychiatrization – can have a range of negative consequences across social, political, and individual spheres, impacting how we understand ourselves and others.

Now, a forthcoming study by Zoey Lavallee argues that psychiatrization also impacts our “affective scaffolding” – meaning the different ways that agents engage with, recruit or modify their environments to actively shape their emotions, moods, or other affective phenomena.

“Affective scaffolding,” writes Lavallee, “refers to the variety of ways that we engage with or structure the environment in order to alter our affective lives – to enhance, suppress, regulate, or induce emotions, or otherwise transform affectivity.”

“Psychiatric drugs are designed, marketed, and prescribed as technologies that have the special power to transform affective life by intervening on the pathological underpinnings of distress and suffering to change how we feel,” Lavallee writes. “Psychiatrization influences affective scaffolding by biasing individuals toward psychiatric drugs to manage an expanding array of affective experiences.”

While the author suggests that the impact of this influence is not always a negative, bad pharmaceutical scaffolding results when our bias towards psychiatric drugs leads to overreliance on these drugs.

According to Lavallee, this overreliance occurs where

(1) at least some of the key determinants of these affective experiences are properties of the agent’s environment, in contrast to, in a strict sense, properties internal to the person, and

(2) pharmaceutical scaffolding obviates the need for or displaces other non-pharmaceutical options that would better serve the agent’s affective needs and interests.