Panic Diaries

Orr Jackie Orr

Description

Part cultural history, part sociological critique, and part literary performance, Panic Diaries explores the technological and social construction of individual and collective panic. Jackie Orr looks at instances of panic and its "cures" in the twentieth-century United States: from the mass hysteria following the 1938 radio broadcast of H. G. Wells's War of the Worlds to an individual woman swallowing a pill to control the "panic disorder" officially recognized by the American Psychiatric Association in 1980. Against a backdrop of Cold War anxieties over atomic attack, Orr highlights the entanglements of knowledge and power in efforts to reconceive panic and its prevention as problems in communication and information feedback. Throughout, she reveals the shifting techniques of power and social engineering underlying the ways that scientific and social scientific discourses-including crowd psychology, Cold War cybernetics, and contemporary psychiatry-have rendered panic an object of technoscientific management.Orr, who has experienced panic attacks herself, kept a diary of her participation as a research subject in clinical trials for the Upjohn Company's anti-anxiety drug Xanax. This "panic diary" grounds her study and suggests the complexity of her desire to track the diffusion and regulation of panic in U.S. society. Orr's historical research, theoretical reflections, and biographical narrative combine in this remarkable and compelling genealogy, which documents the manipulation of panic by the media, the social sciences and psychiatry, the U.S. military and government, and transnational drug companies.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• Popular culture
• Abnormal psychology

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 01 mars 2006
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822387367
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

 

PANIC DIARIES A Genealogy of Panic Disorder

 

Duke University Press Durham and London



©  Duke University Press

All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper  Designed by Rebecca M. Giménez

Typeset in Minion by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data and republication acknowledgments appear on the last printed pages of this book.

                   

             ‘‘    !’’













Acknowledgments ix

Prologue 

History, Memory, Story: Openings 

The Martian in the Machine: Panic Theory and Theaters of War 

‘‘Keep Calm!’’ for the Cold War: Diary of a Mental Patient 

Performing Methods: Cybernetics, Psycho- pharmacology, and Postwar Psychiatry 

Panic Xanax: A Patient Diary 

Epilogue 

Notes 

Bibliography 

Index 

 

The social webs of knowledge, challenge, love, money, labor, and friend- ship that have made this book possible are a pleasure to try to name. In Boston, Stephen Pfohl and the Parasite Cafe introduced me to the radical arts and science of a sociology cut by surrealism. With Vic- toria Burke, Mark Driscoll, Cristina Favretto, Avery Gordon, Jeremy Grainger, Andrew Herman, Sandra Joshel, Pelle Lowe, Josef Mendoza, Diane Nelson, and Sit-Com International, I learned tons about the col- lective powers of creative dis-ease. In Berkeley, the friendship of Eliza- beth Bernstein, Shana Cohen, LuAnne Codella, Robert Glick, Teresa Gowan, Maren Klawiter, Natasha Kirsten Kraus, Mary Peelen, Pamela Perry, the Pushy Bottoms, Will Rountree, Leslie Salzinger, Laurie Schaff- ner, Noga Shalev, and Françoise Vergès gave me intellectual comradeship that I continue to cherish today. In Syracuse, Monisha Das Gupta, Marj DeVault, Mary Ellen Kavanaugh, Claudia Klaver, Andrew London, and Julia Loughlin have kept me warm. To Dóvar Chen, my love and deepest thanks. Troy Duster graciously took on my ‘‘case’’ when I was a dissertation student, and guided me with sweet assurances that I was never really lost. Adele Clarke, Patricia Clough, Joan Fujimura, Caren Kaplan, Maren Klawiter, Emily Martin, Roddey Reid, Molly Rhodes, and Jennifer Terry have all read pieces of the manuscript at different stages. I am indebted to their engaged criticisms and encouragements. Donna Haraway and the late Kathy Acker have been transformative teachers, though I have never sat in their classrooms. I learned from reading their work how to experiment with thinking and language; this book would not have been thought, or written, without their fierce intelligence. Much of the research and writing of the book was generously sup- ported by the Institute for the Study of Social Change, the Department of Sociology, and the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities at the