Tag: medicalization

The Politics of Distress: A Discussion With Dr. James Davies on...

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James Davies on the medicalization and individualizing of distress and its connection to neoliberal ideology, and the need to focus on pervasive inequality and other social causes.

How Far Has Psychiatry Really Come? Historical Practices Versus Modern-Day Psychiatry

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The basic assumptions behind unethical practices like lobotomies and insulin shock therapy are still the foundation on which psychiatryā€™s main treatments are built today.

Psychiatry and the Stupidification of America

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There are three steps to modern psychiatryā€™s successful business formula: 1. Get people to think that theyā€™re stupid even though theyā€™re smart. 2. Train them to actually think stupidly. 3. Directly stupidify them with chemicals.

UN Report Criticizes Biomedical Approach to Mental Health

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UN official writes that States should focus instead on resolving social inequality and injustice as determinants of health and human rights.

Poverty, Pathology and Pills: An Interview with Dr. Felicity Thomas and...

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MIAā€™s Tim Beck interviews Dr. Felicity Thomas and Dr. Richard Byng about their report, Poverty, Pathology, and Pills, which situates increasing rates of mental health diagnosis and psychiatric prescriptions within socioeconomic and policy trends across the UK.

Why Are the Youngest Children in a Classroom Diagnosed with ADHD?

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A new article examines the implications of relative age on the ADHD diagnosis.

Psychological Effects of Austerity Policies and Poverty Over-Medicalized, Report Finds

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Recent report underscores troubling trends cutting across poverty, austerity reform, and mental health narratives in health care settings.

Psychotropic Medications Serve as Powerful Tools for U.S. Military, Imperialism

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Ethnographic research sheds light on extensive psychopharmaceutical use by soldiers in post 9/11 U.S. wars.

What is Contributory Injustice in Psychiatry?

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An article on contributory injustice describes the clinical and ethical imperative that clinicians listen to service users experiences.

Medicalizing Society

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From Jacobin: "...the idea that population-wide rates of despair and social dysfunction should be understood as biological diseases, rather than the result of rampant...

Exploring the Tension Between Educational Psychology and Child Psychiatry

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Researchers explore efforts to integrate educational psychology and child psychiatry.

Mental Health Apps May Lead to Overdiagnosis, Study Finds

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A new study finds that mental health apps promote a one-dimensional view of mental health.

Study Calls for Consensus on Overdiagnosis Across Medical Disciplines

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Lack of overdiagnosis parameters stifles communication across fields seeking to mitigate its potential harm.

Study Explores Meanings of Bipolar Disorder to Those Diagnosed

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The narratives about Bipolar Disorder promoted by drug companies may influence how those diagnosed understand themselves.

Problem Behaviors are Medicalized in White Children and Criminalized in Black...

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Race often determines whether school punishment or therapy and drugs will be used to address childrenā€™s problem behaviors.

The Medicalization of Conversation

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Language, and how we use it, are important to counsellingā€™s conversational work. As a counsellor, my language for understanding and addressing client concerns often fits poorly with the diagnostic and treatment language used to manage services within that system.

Talking Madness With Robert Whitaker

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On Friday, June 9th, Robert Whitaker participated in a discussion with Lois Holzman about psychiatry, the medicalization of distress, and alternative practices. Click hereĀ to...

ā€œKidsā€™ Anxiety ā€“ itā€™s a Normal Part of Growing upā€

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Psychology professor Line Caes writes for The Conversation: ā€œWhile itā€™s important to acknowledge childrenā€™s worries and reassure them that things are okay, children at...

Bipolar Diagnosis Linked to Childhood Adversity

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With the ties between traumatic childhood experiences and mental health issues, should we continue to focus on biological approaches?

Critics Push WHO to Remove Transgender from List of Mental Illnesses

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The World Health Organization (WHO) currently lists being transgender as a medical condition and mental illness. Critics argue that the worldā€™s leading health organization...

WSJ Hosts Debate on Depression Screening

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The U.S. Preventive Services Task ForceĀ (USPSTF) recently issued a controversial recommendation that all adolescent and adult patients undergo depression screening in primary care. The...

NIMH Info for Parents on ā€œADHDā€ Misleading, Researchers Say

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A new analysis of the information that the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) publishes for parents about attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) concludes that the childrenā€™s experiences and contexts are ignored and that medication is presented, misleadingly, as the only solution supported by research evidence.

Novelist on ADHD: ā€œBeing Different is Not an Illnessā€

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On Sunday, the front page of the UKā€™s Independent ran a story entitled, ā€œThousands of children are being medicated for ADHD ā€“ when the condition may not even exist.ā€ Fiction novelist and author of the upcoming ā€œConcentr8,ā€ William Sutcliffe, writes, ā€œThe pharmaceutical/medical industry teaches us that whatever the problem, a pill is the answer.ā€ ā€œThis notion is becoming so all-powerful, and so locked together with a pressurised, exam-centred, conformist educational system, that every parent who has a misbehaving or inattentive child may now find themselves pushed towards a diagnosis of ADHD.ā€

ADHD:Ā A Destructive and Disempowering Label; Not an Illness

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In recent years, we've seen an increasing number of articles and papers from psychiatrists in which they seem to be accepting at least some of the antipsychiatry criticisms, and appear interested in reforms. It is tempting to see this development as an indication of progress, but as in many aspects of life, things aren't always what they seem.

The Psychopathology of American Life

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ā€˜Iā€™m severely depressed.ā€™ These were the words that Donesha*, a 35 year-old African American woman repeatedly uttered to me.