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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how psychotropic drugs in contemporary Lebanon are mobilized to treat social and political pain, while the care of the soul unfolds through multiple pathways, including spiritual practices, therapeutic work, political initiatives, and artistic projects.

Paper long abstract

This paper presents initial findings from a postdoctoral research project that examines experiences of suffering, mental health care (khadamāt al-soḥḥa al-nafsiyya), and recovery practices in contemporary Lebanon, amid widespread pauperization, war, forced displacement, and uncertainty about the region’s future. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the analysis focuses on care pathways, situating mental health care alongside everyday resources and customary or alternative recovery practices.

The paper explores the hypothesis of a specific social relationship to psychotropic medications—commonly referred to as “nerve medicines” or “sleeping pills,—that appears relatively independent from other therapeutic choices shaping care trajectories. Psychotropic drugs are not perceived as fundamentally distinct from medications used to treat physical pain, such as those for migraines or stomach pain (e.g. paracetamol), which may also be mobilized for their calming or sleep-inducing effects. This relationship appears to date back to the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990), a period marked by increased consumption of psychotropic and other psychoactive substances (Baddoura 1990), and persists through the continued non-prescription dispensing of these medications by pharmacies (Solberg, 2008).

The paper examines the social relationships surrounding psychotropic use, showing how these medications are often resignified as a form of quasi-collective support that enables endurance under protracted violence. Their use coexists with multiple spiritual, artistic, therapeutic, or collective pathways to recovery. Belief in partial efficacy does not imply acceptance of biomedical causality, suggesting a renewed approach to medical pluralism attentive to how therapeutic objects are differently inhabited and reworked in practice.