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The book’s
argument starts with the Iranian psychiatric discourse and the
afterlife of the
Iran-Iraq war,
providing a rich opportunity for analyzing how new forms of self and
generational voice
can emerge from multiple entangled threads such as historical
embeddedness,
institutional legitimations, cross-generational transferences, and
discourses of
morality, medicine,
psychiatry, and identity. Psychiatric modes of articulation in Iran
is a
growing cultural
middle class; one does not need to be well off to absorb media
debates on
depression which may
encourage psychiatric education while simultaneously negating it.
Psychiatric mode in
middle class has been more influenced by an American spirit than an
Iranian one and
sometimes assumed a consensus about concepts such as modernity and
progress. Hereof,
the psychiatric discourse of the 1990s facilitated the
resocialization of
wartime loss and
gave Iranians a language for articulating and working through its
affective
experiences. By
relying on this atmosphere, the author elaborates “making sense by
blogs”,
saying that while
the virtual space is categorically a projective space of “make
believe”,
Iranian blogs also
create social forms and multilevel dialogue that complement the gaps
in
bloggers’ social
lives and allow them to negotiate their emotional experiences and
their
meanings. They
serve, foremost, as places to “make sense”. Here, Behruzan
highlights the
relation between
Illness narratives and trauma and memory, she believes while
psychoanalysis
and psychodynamic
approaches in psychiatry allow for interpersonal retelling of
traumatic
memory, they often
focus on the individual’s lived affect by The merging of clinical
and
anthropological
approach as well as the biological and the cultural ones. Moreover,
nowadays,
advances are being
made in the field of epigenetics toward understanding generational
transfers of
traumatic experiences via genetic mutations. Illness narratives can
contribute to
or challenge those
advances for example, children may no longer grow up under Iraqi
bombs,
but are raised by
parents who were, so children assume that they have experienced war
life.
Equally important
are the narratives of medicine itself, of doctors’ lives, and of
their
experiences of
professionalization, acculturation, and socialization.