By the close of the 1990s, a Persian psychiatric vernacular had become widespread in Iranian media, art, literature, and blogs. Depreshen became slang among youth, as did the Persianized catchall term for antidepressants, prozāk. People began to speak publicly and commonly about their medication, or of depreshen. But there was more to this medicalization of life than meets the eye. Psychiatry seemed to provide a new legitimized language for making sense of life and talking about emotion and memory. Prozak Diaries combines clinical and anthropological perspectives to analyze this significant cultural and generational change in post 1990s Iran and the ways in which people articulate their individual, social, and historical experiences in the adopted language of psychiatry.

Orkideh Behrouzan is Assistant Professor of Medical Anthropology at King's College London.