Ronald Pies MD argues that it doesn’t.
http://philosophynow.org/issues/99/Does ... _Normality
Does Psychiatry Medicalize Normality?
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Re: Does Psychiatry Medicalize Normality?
Most people do not have the writer's difficulties with the term 'medicalize'. People who declare themselves to be practicing medicine are treating people who have been deemed patients with what have been deemed medical treatments. They are diagnosing, hypothesizing, prescribing and in some cases compelling patients by force of law to accept treatment. They are doing all the four things the writer himself lists. They are medicalizing. This is happening.
No definition of normality? Exactly. This is psychiatry's whole problem. At any time and place in history if you break your leg, you have a broken leg, but society's expectations of behaviour can change. Homosexuality used to be in the DSM. It no longer is, while all manner of forms of problematic behaviour vie for inclusion and the shadowy high priests of psychiatry pronounce which are to be biblified. Criteria are sharpened to appear clinical, but in the words of refreshingly sane psychiatrist Joanna Moncrieff, speaking about 'Intermittent Explosive Disorder' on Jon Ronson's 'roadtrip to the erroding coastline of normality' "...they are trying to put in a few more specifications to make it look more scientific but actually it doesn't change the fact that what is being labelled is people losing their temper."
http://www.jonronson.com/Jon_Ronson_On_Being_Normal.mp3
Moncrieff is is the author of the book The Bitterest Pills, which tells the sorry tale of how anti-psychotic drugs, initially seen for the tranquilizers they are, came to be falsely viewed as disease-specific treatments or even cures. It started with the wishful thinking of the authorities who wanted to close inhumane and expensive asylums, replacing them with care in the community. By the twenty-first century, pharmaceutical industry-sponsored public information campaigns were encouraging anyone with emotional ups-and-downs to go to a doctor and get a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. Here is Moncrieff on the expansion of the definition of bipolar...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/artic ... egot-.html
In the future, the nascent science of neuroscience may enlighten us as to what is going on in our brains when we behave in certain ways. Yet the judgement as to which forms of behaviour are acceptable and which not, will always be a moral one, however much a morally confused society may wish otherwise.
In the meantime, The Critical Psychiatry Network is a welcome example of psychiatrists who actually want to help people with behavioural problems, without feeling the need to puff themselves up into the clinicians they can never be, or lowering themselves to becoming the cronies of Big Pharma.
http://www.criticalpsychiatry.co.uk/
No definition of normality? Exactly. This is psychiatry's whole problem. At any time and place in history if you break your leg, you have a broken leg, but society's expectations of behaviour can change. Homosexuality used to be in the DSM. It no longer is, while all manner of forms of problematic behaviour vie for inclusion and the shadowy high priests of psychiatry pronounce which are to be biblified. Criteria are sharpened to appear clinical, but in the words of refreshingly sane psychiatrist Joanna Moncrieff, speaking about 'Intermittent Explosive Disorder' on Jon Ronson's 'roadtrip to the erroding coastline of normality' "...they are trying to put in a few more specifications to make it look more scientific but actually it doesn't change the fact that what is being labelled is people losing their temper."
http://www.jonronson.com/Jon_Ronson_On_Being_Normal.mp3
Moncrieff is is the author of the book The Bitterest Pills, which tells the sorry tale of how anti-psychotic drugs, initially seen for the tranquilizers they are, came to be falsely viewed as disease-specific treatments or even cures. It started with the wishful thinking of the authorities who wanted to close inhumane and expensive asylums, replacing them with care in the community. By the twenty-first century, pharmaceutical industry-sponsored public information campaigns were encouraging anyone with emotional ups-and-downs to go to a doctor and get a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. Here is Moncrieff on the expansion of the definition of bipolar...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/artic ... egot-.html
In the future, the nascent science of neuroscience may enlighten us as to what is going on in our brains when we behave in certain ways. Yet the judgement as to which forms of behaviour are acceptable and which not, will always be a moral one, however much a morally confused society may wish otherwise.
In the meantime, The Critical Psychiatry Network is a welcome example of psychiatrists who actually want to help people with behavioural problems, without feeling the need to puff themselves up into the clinicians they can never be, or lowering themselves to becoming the cronies of Big Pharma.
http://www.criticalpsychiatry.co.uk/