17 Search Results

For the term "medicalization".

Science & Technology / Sociology of Law, Crime and Deviance / Sociology of Organizations & Work

Just a Flash in the Pan?: Institutional Fads and the Medicalization of Addiction

In popular culture, fads are common occurrences that follow a relatively basic trajectory.  That is, cultural fads typically materialize, become increasingly popular, and then fade away almost as quickly as they appeared (Best 2006).  From American Idol to zoot suits, fads associated with pop culture rapidly rise and promptly plummet before being replaced by a new trend that is ultimately destined to follow a similar path.  This cycle of emerging, surging, and purging is not, however, limited only to relatively...

Science & Technology

Health insurance for millions more and the future of medicalization

A bill to extend health insurance to millions more Americans and to cut premiums and force coverage for pre-existing conditions for all Americans passed the house this week. President Obama will sign the bill today. At the Eastern Sociological Society conference in Boston this past weekend, I attended a panel on resistance to medicalization where Peter Conrad, who one might call the father of contemporary medicalization theory,  presented a new project on the medicalization of chronic pain. The overarching theme of...

Opinion / Science & Technology / Sociology of Health & Illness / Sociology of Media & Communication

How to make sense of the debate on “study drugs”?

“Medicalization“ as a theoretical concept has received much attention in sociology throughout decades and people’s drug use is a social phenomenon investigated from different perspectives in the social and life sciences. Research on “study drugs” is an area where many of these perspectives converge – not only because it prompts us to reconsider the treatment/enhancement distinction. In this article, Stephan Schleim describes how the topic of (allegedly) performance-enhancing drugs has fascinated him since high school. When scholars started discussing this...

Opinion / Social Psychology & Lifecourse / Sociology of Children / Sociology of Health & Illness

Classroom babies more at risk for ADHD

Max and Julian are starting kindergarten this year and they are very looking forward their entrance at elementary school. Max will be turning 5-year-old on September 12th and Julian will be 6 on October 12th. They have one year apart, but they have so much fun together, they are delighted to be in the same classroom! This one-year gap between children in a same classroom is common. To determine when a child should enter school, his/her birthdate is compared with...

Opinion / Sociology of Health & Illness

The Psychiatrization of Society: Why we should care

Some years ago, I started my residency as a psychiatrist in a hospital close to Berlin. I was prepared for my job also to encompass meeting people who were not very pleased about meeting me. As one of the downsides of my career choice, I expected to inevitably become a part of the disciplinary institution that Foucault and others had famously described (Foucault 1965; Goffman 1961; Szasz 1974), being obliged to play a main role in cases of compulsory treatment...

Opinion / Sociology of Children / Sociology of Health & Illness

Researchers should do more to bring their findings to society: the case of ADHD-medication

In 2020, I co-authored a paper with one of my PhD students, entitled A prescription trend analysis of methylphenidate: relation to study reports on efficacy. In this study by Maruschka Sluiter and colleagues, the prescription-rate of ADHD pills in the Netherlands was analyzed in relation to newly published evidence regarding the lack of their efficacy. We showed that several negative study reports from 2007 onwards did not lead to significant reduction in the rate of methylphenidate (MPH) prescriptions. The data...

Opinion / Social Identity / Social Psychology & Lifecourse / Sociology of Health & Illness / Sociology of Organizations & Work

Employee well-being and versions of corporate-driven orthorexia

Context In 1997, Steven Bratman [2] launched the concept of ‘orthorexia’, derived from the Greek “orthos”, meaning “correct or right” and “orexis”, meaning “hunger or appetite”. He described his own “pathological fixation on eating proper food”; including ritualized eating of vegetables picked no more than 15 minutes before consumption, and chewing each mouthful at least 50 times before swallowing. Following this, social discourse [1, 5, 12] has defined healthy nutrition as eating simply, ‘pure’, ‘clean’, wholesome, non-processed diets; diets which...

Gender & Sexuality

Can We Just Say "Menstruation" Please!

  Several years ago, I worked on a project designed to examine how menstruation is socially constructed and how this construction has created social taboos that have impacted American women’s attitudes towards their bodies before, during, and after menstruation.  After speaking with women between the ages of eighteen and sixty, I found women today often feel “dirty,” “gross,” or “unclean” while menstruating.  Although some women also associated menstruation positively with childbirth and motherhood, the majority of women I spoke to...

Sociology of Culture

Summer TV and Critical Disability Studies

Characters with “disabilities” are being more regularly depicted in entertainment media: The lead character of House suffers from chronic pain and walks with a limp; Glee has characters with Down’s syndrome, severe OCD, and mobility restrictions requiring wheelchairs; Perception has a schizophrenic crime-solving professor. And, this coming October, Turner Classic Movies will be showcasing some 20 movies featuring disabilities and disabled characters in a series the channel is calling “The Projected Image: A History of Disability in Film.” While not...

Science & Technology / Sociology of Law, Crime and Deviance

Illness or Deviance: A Contested Space Between Criminal Justice and Medicine

Foucault wrote that the nineteenth century ushered in a new way to inspect the body; recognizing that medical personnel had placed the patient under “perpetual examination” (1975). His interest, however, was on the discourse that produced, maintained, and extended the medical look or “gaze” (1975). The “clinic,” for Foucault, became an apparatus of examination; a site of knowledge production bound by rules and regulations. It became an authoritative institution where the individual became the object of scrutiny (Long, 1992). Following...

Class & Stratification / Political & Economic Sociology / Race & Ethnicity Studies / Science & Technology / Sociology of Culture / Sociology of Law, Crime and Deviance

Problem Solving Courts

In mid February 2011 The Guardian newspaper published an edited version of David Faulkner’s contribution to the United Kingdom’s Centre for Crime and Justice Studies’ report “Lessons for the Coalition” which was written in response to the first report of the National Preventative Mechanism – a new body set up under the optional protocol to the UN convention against torture. The National Preventative Mechanism’s report highlighted problem areas in the UK’s approach to mental health, resources, vulnerable groups such as...

Science & Technology / Social Psychology & Lifecourse

Hoarding and other disorders – are they rooted in the mind or the market? And what does this tell us about mental illness?

Of late, behaviors such as hoarding are getting a lot of attention. TV shows devoted to the tormented lives of hoarders have hit the scene and certainly, an increase in interest among mental health professionals and the media has surfaced. There are several substantive sociological issues here that go beyond the psychological elements and individual consequences of hoarding behavior – or buying, spending, drinking, gambling – all of which are considered by the American Psychiatric Association to be disorders in...

Gender & Sexuality / Science & Technology

Editor's Highlights: Reconsidering "Medical" and "Natural" through a Gender and Power Lens

Social science research has been lax in the use of terms medical and natural, using the words without problematizing them.  Yet a cursory glance at the way research regards men’s health and women’s health reveals a striking pattern.  While men are empowered by the medicalization of their bodies, women are disempowered by the same process.  Sarah Jane Brubaker and Heather E. Dillaway’s January 2009 article in the Gender section of Sociology Compass offers a revealing look at childbirth.  They review existing...

Science & Technology

What does calling something a disorder do? the case of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

By Dena T. Smith This week’s Science Times reported that Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, (which causes the symptoms one might imagine, given the name of the condition) a set of symptoms with unidentified etiology, has been linked to a virus. This possible cause may potentially shed some light on the mysterious derivations of the syndrome, which many sufferers would like to see conceptualized as an illness or disease. While the story of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is a fascinating and sometimes disturbing one, for sociologists,...

Gender & Sexuality / Science & Technology / Social Movements / Social Change / Social Psychology & Lifecourse / Sociology of Culture / Sociology of Media & Communication / Sociology of Organizations & Work

Transphotography

by kiddingthecity Transsexual people are willing to become invisible, international acclaimed photographer and researcher Sara Davidmann maintains, in order to be accepted in the social norm, which wants a strict binary distinction between genders.  The issue of safety in public space here, I guess, is crucial – hence, the urge to comply to the visual stereotype of the male or of the female. As it is the issue of ‘medicalization’, that is, the tendency of western culture to push ‘deviance’...

Political & Economic Sociology / Sociology of Culture

"Illness as Metaphor"

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDsh98OxEQQ] (the video is a song by the inhabitants of Losheng Sanatorium, singing their love and attachment to the Losheng community) By linanne 10 Taiwanese students have been extremely busy for participating in social movements the past two months. After the protest against the regulation on the freedom of speech and assembly, Taiwanese students are now again bringing back the issue on the Losheng Sanatorium. The Losheng Sanatorium is a community like construction for displacing leprosy patients during the Japanese...