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In 2006, the United States Department of Defense for the first time authorized the use of FDA-approved psychiatric medications in the physical and tactical spaces of military operations including active combat. This policy change overturned a century of military psychiatry orthodoxy, which prioritized non-pathologizing, non-medication treatment for combat stress. Amid an ongoing global war, the US military embraced psychopharmacy as a radical and untested tool for keeping soldiers on the counterinsurgency battlefield and deploying them again and again, even with psychiatric diagnoses. Through powerful storytelling and original analysis, Stabilizing Empire uncovers a quiet revolution during the war on terror: the pharmaceuticalization of battlefield mental health care.
“From the small white pills of psychopharmacology to the sprawling global maps of US empire, Jocelyn Lim Chua connects changes in the battlefield use of mental health drugs to the rise of commitment to a state of permanent war. A brilliant and never more necessary book.”—Catherine Lutz, author of Homefront: A Military City and the American Twentieth Century and The Bases of Empire
“Tracing pharmacological stabilization as an embodied process, this book shows what drugs actually do—in bodies, relationships, and institutions, and in support of US war and empire. This is an incredibly important contribution.”—Ken MacLeish, author of Making War at Fort Hood: Life and Uncertainty in a Military Community
“Through deft ethnography and brilliant prose, Chua fearlessly and sensitively faces the brutality of imperial violence without losing the humanity of the people whose job it is to carry it out. A must-read for anyone interested in the intersections between war, psychiatry, and empire.”—Nadia El-Shaarawi, author of Collateral Damages: Tracing the Debts and Displacements of the Iraq War