Tag: medicalization

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.

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

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

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

MIA’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.

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

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

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

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

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...

Researchers explore efforts to integrate educational psychology and child psychiatry.

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

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

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

Race often determines whether school punishment or therapy and drugs will be used to address children’s problem behaviors.

Language, and how we use it, are important to counselling’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.

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

Psychology professor Line Caes writes for The Conversation: “While it’s important to acknowledge children’s worries and reassure them that things are okay, children at...

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

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

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

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 children’s experiences and contexts are ignored and that medication is presented, misleadingly, as the only solution supported by research evidence.

On Sunday, the front page of the UK’s Independent ran a story entitled, “Thousands of children are being medicated for ADHD – when the condition may not even exist.” Fiction novelist and author of the upcoming “Concentr8,” William Sutcliffe, writes, “The pharmaceutical/medical industry teaches us that whatever the problem, a pill is the answer.” “This 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.”

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.

‘I’m severely depressed.’ These were the words that Donesha*, a 35 year-old African American woman repeatedly uttered to me.