Gendered aspects of Danish students’ non-medical use of prescription pharmaceuticals for enhancement purposes in the ‘performance society’

Abstract

Research has shown an increase in the experience of educational pressure among students in contemporary Western societies and also, in their use of pharmaceuticals, for enhancement purposes. Based on qualitative interviews with 60 Danish students conducted in 2016, this article analyses student narratives about their use of pharmaceuticals to meet the expectations they experience in the educational settings. Though many students find pharmaceuticals useful, interesting gender differences exist regarding their motives and legitimations of use, and regarding pharmaceuticals of choice. By using two paradigmatic, narrative cases the article suggests that a ‘male strategy’ of augmentation is more in accordance with the overall requirement to perform and succeed in the ‘performance society’ than a ‘female strategy’ of normalisation. The article argues that there may be a parallel between the increasing numbers of women in Danish society diagnosed with stress and anxiety, the media representations of achieving women being more vulnerable than men, and the gender differences in pharmaceutical use. The paper aims to contribute to a nuanced discussion of the relations between educational pressure, gender and use of pharmaceuticals for enhancement purposes in contemporary Western societies.

Keywords:

• Pharmaceuticals
• cognitive enhancement
• gender
• educational pressure
• non-medical use
• normalization
• augmentation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Although there is not much research on gendered aspects of pharmaceutical enhancement, e.g. Osborne, Serdarevic, Crooke, Striley, and Cottler (2017) find some interesting gender differences in non-medical opioid use, and suggest that further research on gender differences is needed.

2 Not only has gender been largely ignored but so also has the intersection between gender and class. Renold and Allan (2006) have noted that while many middle class girls seem to embody discourses of perfect academic achievement, working class female students may feel more ambivalent about such discourses.

3 We recognize that exam anxiety is a condition that sometimes may qualify for medical treatment.

4 Like the above-mentioned study by Djøf (2017), I categorize the use of beta-blockers as NMPCE. The young women in our material explicitly use beta-blockers with the purpose to enhance their performance in order to strive for academic goals that they otherwise experience as unobtainable (Møldrup, 1999). They say, that they think they would do fine without them, but that their brain works better with the pharmaceutical, because their heart beats more slowly.

5 Also, it is worth noting, that the young students do not think this legal difference is importance.

6 Such a broad question recruited participants using a range of different substances. The most common pharmaceuticals though, were Ritalin and Beta-Blockers.