{"title":"Stefan Ecks","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"eating-drugs-book-stefan-ecks-9780814724767","title":"Eating Drugs","description":"A Hindu monk in Calcutta refuses to take his psychotropic medications. His psychiatrist explains that just as his body needs food, the drugs are nutrition for his starved mind. Does it matter how—or whether—patients understand their prescribed drugs?   Millions of people in India are routinely prescribed mood medications. Pharmaceutical companies give doctors strong incentives to write as many prescriptions as possible, with as little awkward questioning from patients as possible. Without a sustained public debate on psychopharmaceuticals in India, patients remain puzzled by the notion that drugs can cure disturbances of the mind. While biomedical psychopharmaceuticals are perceived with great suspicion, many non-biomedical treatments are embraced.   Stefan Ecks illuminates how biomedical, Ayurvedic, and homeopathic treatments are used in India, and argues that pharmaceutical pluralism changes popular ideas of what drugs do. Based on several years of research on pharmaceutical markets, Ecks shows how doctors employ a wide range of strategies to make patients take the remedies prescribed. Yet while metaphors such as \"mind food\" may succeed in getting patients to accept the prescriptions, they also obscure a critical awareness of drug effects.  This rare ethnography of pharmaceuticals will be of key interest to those in the anthropology and sociology of medicine, pharmacology, mental health, bioethics, global health, and South Asian studies.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50362584760593,"sku":"CIN0814724760G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52425245327633,"sku":"NLS9780814724767","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0814724760.jpg?v=1758967680"},{"product_id":"living-worth-book-stefan-ecks-9781478017677","title":"Living Worth","description":"In Living Worth Stefan Ecks draws on ethnographic research on depression and antidepressant usage in India to develop a new theory of value. Framing depressive disorder as a problem of value, Ecks traces the myriad ways antidepressants come to have value, from their ability to help make one’s life worth living to the wealth they generate in the multibillion-dollar global pharmaceutical market. Through case studies that include analyses of the different valuation of generic and brand-name drugs, the origins of rising worldwide depression rates, and the marketing, prescription, and circulation of antidepressants, Ecks theorizes value as a process of biocommensuration. Biocommensurations—transactions that aim or claim to make life better—are those forms of social, medical, and corporate actions that allow value to be measured, exchanged, substituted, and redistributed. Ecks’s theory expands value beyond both a Marxist labor theory of value and a free market subjective theory, thereby offering new insights into how the value of lives and things become entangled under neoliberal capitalism.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50376510832913,"sku":"CIN1478017678G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51224195465489,"sku":"NIN9781478017677","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52081930240273,"sku":"CIN1478017678VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1478017678.jpg?v=1761391170"},{"product_id":"living-worth-book-stefan-ecks-9781478015048","title":"Living Worth","description":"In Living Worth Stefan Ecks draws on ethnographic research on depression and antidepressant usage in India to develop a new theory of value. Framing depressive disorder as a problem of value, Ecks traces the myriad ways antidepressants come to have value, from their ability to help make one’s life worth living to the wealth they generate in the multibillion-dollar global pharmaceutical market. Through case studies that include analyses of the different valuation of generic and brand-name drugs, the origins of rising worldwide depression rates, and the marketing, prescription, and circulation of antidepressants, Ecks theorizes value as a process of biocommensuration. Biocommensurations—transactions that aim or claim to make life better—are those forms of social, medical, and corporate actions that allow value to be measured, exchanged, substituted, and redistributed. Ecks’s theory expands value beyond both a Marxist labor theory of value and a free market subjective theory, thereby offering new insights into how the value of lives and things become entangled under neoliberal capitalism.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51227753447697,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51227755806993,"sku":"NIN9781478015048","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1478015047.jpg?v=1761389862"},{"product_id":"psychopharmaceuticals-in-india-book-stefan-ecks-9780415590396","title":"Psychopharmaceuticals in India","description":"This book analyses two specific processes of globalization that have had an impact on the changing nature of doctor-patient encounters in India. One is the immense and successful growth of the global market in antidepressants over recent years, to the effect scholars speak of an \"antidepressant era\". The other process is the rising Indian generics industry, which is to become the world largest manufacturer of generic medications by volume. This expansion was made possible by the Indian patent regime that was in place from 1972 to 2005, which allowed thousands of small, medium, and large companies to reverse-engineer and sell drugs that were patent-protected in European and North American countries. Indian manufacturers did not only recapture from multinational companies the majority share of the domestic pharmaceuticals market, but they also to become the new \"pharmacy of the world\" through drug exports.      Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in India, this book shows how the prescription habits of Indian allopathic practitioners (psychiatrists, general physicians, and untrained \"quacks\") have changed through the easy availability of generic psychopharmaceuticals. The author also analyses how both popular and professional perceptions of mind, body, and psychological distress are being transformed by pharmaceutical marketing. Additionally, this book demonstrates how regulatory and bioethical regimes in both India and beyond contribute both to the rise of Indian generic manufacturers and the rise of psychopharmaceutical uses. Exploring in detail this \"reverse globalization\" process of India's psychopharmaceuticals industry and their crossings with other streams of global forces, this book questions the common center-periphery relationship of Western thinking and links macrosocial factors with the level of experience of different social actors, thus providing a unique contribution to current debates in the medical anthropology, medical sociology, transcultural psychiatry and Asia Studies.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52987702575377,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":52987702706449,"sku":"NGR9780415590396","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780415590396.jpg?v=1767364199"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/en-gb\/collections\/author-books-by-stefan-ecks.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}