The Embodied Mind as Pharmacological Target: Towards a Phenomenology of Psychopharmacological Interventions.
Psychopathology January 1, 2025 Stefan Jerotić, Janko Nešić, Vuk Vuković et al. 3 citations
Psychopharmacology is often reduced to treating biological symptoms while ignoring patients' subjective, embodied experience. This paper proposes an enactive and embodied framework that integrates phenomenology, neuroscience, and physiology to understand how psychotropic drugs affect the entire lived body—altering emotional processing, perception, existential feelings, and the embodied sense of self. Medications shape how patients engage with their environment, which in turn influences the embodied system. The clinician's role is to mediate these embodied changes, supporting patients through shifts in self-perception and relationality. The authors advocate for phenomenological drug profiles and patient-centered interventions that account for subjective and embodied changes alongside clinical efficacy.