The idea that "madness and misery" are medical conditions is contested

For example:

Another Critique of Psychiatry’s Medical Model / 2013

"I have recently read De-Medicalizing Misery [Palgrave Macmillan, 2011].  It’s a comprehensive collection of articles, edited by Mark Rapley, Joanna Moncrieff, and Jacqui Dillon."

A quote from the final chapter:

“In this volume we have attempted to show that the modern conception of madness and misery as diseases, illnesses or disorders that can only be understood within a specialist body of knowledge, fails to do justice to the range and meaning of the experiences these concepts refer to.  More seriously, by designating people’s distress as illness, we ignore the abuse that individuals may have suffered, and in a wider sense, we obscure the features of modern society that make sanity a precarious state for many people.  We enthrone a very particular, and very partisan, ‘truth’ by wreaking violence on the life experience and subjectivity of those we purport to ‘help’.  Diagnoses of schizophrenia, depression or ‘reactive attachment disorder’ are entirely inadequate descriptions of the problems and difficulties that people experience, and the unfolding life story in which those problems are set.  Such labels render people’s experiences as meaningless as if they denoted a rash, a boil, or a cough (cf Parry, 2009).  Moreover, the experiences we have come to be familiar with under the rubric of ‘psychiatric symptoms’ may be more of a signal that all is not well, a signal that something needs to change, than a problem itself.  But, as we have seen in this collection, this perspective is one that is anathema to currently hegemonic medicalized understandings.”


 

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The idea that "madness and misery" are medical conditions is contested
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