The Diminished Resistance to Medicalization in Psychiatry

Dena T. Smith

74 citations0/0 files storedSociety and Mental Health

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Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices Psychology and Mental Health Mental Health and Psychiatry

Abstract

In this paper, I use data from 20 in-depth interviews with psychoanalytically trained psychiatrists (who prescribe medications and practice talk therapy) about their experiences navigating treatment in a profession dominated by the medical model. Psychiatrists’ descriptions of their field and their patients’ troubles support the central claims in sociology about the medicalization of psychiatry. Since the 1980s, the extent to which psychiatric troubles are medicalized has increased dramatically and in new ways. Pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies and consumers drive the current era in medicalization. Psychiatric training is also highly influential on practitioners’ propensities to think and act medically. Qualitative data are crucial for understanding the extent to which medicalization influences practitioners and the degree to which they foster the use of medical interventions. Very few researchers have examined the medicalization of psychiatry from the perspective of psychiatrists, especially psychoanalysts, who offer insight into why medicalization is largely unchallenged within psychiatry.

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References

1992Medicalization and Social Control 1972Medicine as an Institution of Social Control 1995The effectiveness of psychotherapy: The Consumer Reports study.1982Deviance and Medicalization: From Badness to Sickness 2007The Loss of Sadness 2003Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability in an Uncertain Age 2009The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder 1975The Discovery of Hyperkinesis: Notes on the Medicalization of Deviant Behavior

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2023Stalling or oiling the engines of diagnosis? Shifting perspectives on the DSM and categorical diagnosis in psychiatry 2019Diagnostic dissonance and negotiations of biomedicalisation: mental health practitioners’ resistance to the DSM technology and diagnostic standardisation 2017The Dual Continua Model: The Foundation of the Sociology of Mental Health and Mental Illness

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