The Medicalization of the Human Condition

The concept of alternative strategies and its relevance to psychiatry and clinical psychology

“…As these clinical sciences necessarily engage the enormous range of human diversity, they also must move beyond narrowly normative diagnostics and conceptualizations of the healthy ideal to consider the evolutionary origins of individual differences [46]. In psychiatry, the medicalization of the human condition [47] is a long-standing problem. In the past, cultural prejudices and political aims were the major causes of the social construction of mental illness, as for example in the (in)famous case of drapetomania (the 'mental disease' causing black slaves to run away) [48].…”

What is the DSM? Diagnostic manual, cultural icon, political battleground: an overview with suggestions for a critical research agenda

“…Today this is one of the main points of criticism of DSM diagnoses, whose proliferation with each new edition has been equated to a progressive 'medicalisation of the human condition' (e.g. Chodoff, 2002;Rapley, Moncrieff and Dillon, 2011). iv While it is true that expansion in terms of sheer numbers of diagnostic categories and subcategories became conspicuous only from DSM-III onwards, Horwitz (2002, p. 41) argues that this expansion has its roots in dynamic rather than diagnostic psychiatry: Dynamic psychiatry laid the foundations for the sprawling mass of troubling behaviors that diagnostic psychiatry would later formulate as distinct disease entities.…”

Emotional Causes and Dynamics of Current Expectations in Neuroscience

“…Desde hace cincuenta años, nuevos hábitos psicofarmacológicos están arraigando en los países desarrollados, modos diferentes de un consumo farmacológico en el que los límites terapéuticos están siendo progresivamente desdibujados (cfr. Chodoff 2002). Las actuales conversaciones e iniciativas llevadas a cabo en el Consejo de Europa para la regulación de la Medicina Mejorativa (donde el neuro-enhancement ocupa un lugar sobresaliente) no son sino expresión última de dicha realidad -la constatación jurídica-(cfr.…”