ABSTRACT
This article examines the increasing use of psychotropic drugs among university students in Chile within a neoliberal academic context structured by performance demands, meritocratic imperatives and individualised forms of health management. Drawing on a qualitative analysis of 44 interviews conducted across three Chilean universities—two elite traditional institutions and one mass private university—we focus on 14 interviews in which psychotropic drug use emerged as a significant dimension of students’ everyday lives. We conceptualise pharmacological practices as situated sociomaterial arrangements through which students regulate affect, sustain academic functionality and negotiate the demands of neoliberal university life. Within broader moral frameworks of healthism, three overlapping modalities emerge from our material: emotional mediations and performance-oriented use; medicated communities; and the body as interface. Together, these modalities reveal how psychotropic drugs reorganise the timing and intensity of distress, enabling forms of affective continuity and emotional self-regulation under conditions of accelerated academic life. Rather than constituting merely risk behaviours or cognitive enhancement practices, pharmacological practices emerge as technologies of affective and bodily adaptation embedded within Chile’s neoliberal university system, where academic continuity frequently depends on the individualised management of distress structurally produced by the institution itself.