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Objective: To investigate potential associations between individual and country-level factors and medicalization of birth in 15 European countries during the COVID-19 pandemic., Methods: Online anonymous survey of women who gave birth in 2020-2021. Multivariable multilevel logistic regression models estimating associations between indicators of medicalization (cesarean, instrumental vaginal birth [IVB], episiotomy, fundal pressure) and proxy variables related to care culture and contextual factors at the individual and country level., Results: Among 27 173 women, 24.4% (n = 6650) had a cesarean and 8.8% (n = 2380) an IVB. Among women with IVB, 41.9% (n = 998) reported receiving fundal pressure. Among women with spontaneous vaginal births, 22.3% (n = 4048) had an episiotomy. Less respectful care, as perceived by the women, was associated with higher levels of medicalization. For example, women who reported having a cesarean, IVB, or episiotomy reported not feeling treated with dignity more frequently than women who did not have those interventions (odds ratio [OR] 1.37; OR 1.61; OR 1.51, respectively; all: P < 0.001). Country-level variables contributed to explaining some of the variance between countries., Conclusion: We recommend a greater emphasis in health policies on promotion of respectful and patient-centered care approaches to birth to enhance women's experiences of care, and the development of a European-level indicator to monitor medicalization of reproductive care., (© 2022 The Authors. International Journal of Gynecology & Obstetrics published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics.)

Science and technology have vastly expanded the realm of medicine. The numbers of and knowledge about diseases has greatly increased, and we can help more people in many more ways than ever before. At the same time, the extensive expansion has also augmented harms, professional responsibility, and ethical concerns. While these challenges have been studied from a wide range of perspectives, the problems prevail. This article adds value to previous analyses by identifying how the moral imperative of medicine has expanded in three ways: (1) from targeting experienced phenomena, such as pain and suffering, to non-experienced phenomena (paraclinical signs and indicators); (2) from addressing present pain to potential future suffering; and (3) from reducing negative wellbeing (pain and suffering) to promoting positive wellbeing. These expansions create and aggravate problems in medicine: medicalization, overdiagnosis, overtreatment, risk aversion, stigmatization, and healthism. Moreover, they threaten to infringe ethical principles, to distract attention and responsibility from other competent agents and institutions, to enhance the power and responsibility of professionals, and to change the professional-beneficiary relationship. In order to find ways to manage the moral expansion of medicine, four traditional ways of setting limits are analyzed and dismissed. However, basic asymmetries in ethics suggest that it is more justified to address people's negative wellbeing (pain and suffering) than their positive wellbeing. Moreover, differences in epistemology, indicate that it is less uncertain to address present pain and suffering than future wellbeing and happiness. Based on these insights the article concludes that the moral imperative of medicine has a gradient from pain and suffering to wellbeing and happiness, and from the present to the future. Hence, in general present pain and suffering have normative priority over future positive wellbeing., (© 2022. The Author(s).)

Based on qualitative data of an upper-secondary school in Sweden's primary elite community, Djursholm, I propose how medical diagnosis of students as dyslexics contributes to consecrating them by offering a short cut to successful performance, while at the same time reproducing differences between social classes. The study suggests how students that do not score top can be labeled dyslexic and the social and moral consequences of that. I introduce the concept of "consecrating medicalization" in order to discriminate between the effects of medical diagnosis of members of different social classes. In this way, this paper contributes to further examining some key problems in medical sociology and the sociology of elites, by offering a framework of synthesis and integration., (© 2020 London School of Economics and Political Science.)

In a 2010 online Reuter's news article, Andrew Stern claimed that Tiger Woods placed the condition known as 'sex addiction' in the spotlight. Accordingly, this article discusses the extent to which 'sex addiction' is discursively produced within, and by, the media and explores the extent to which Stern's claim can be substantiated. This paper presents an analysis of articles retrieved from nytimes.com that were published between February 18th, 2009, and February 20th, 2011. It goes on to summarize four key findings: (1) 'sex addiction' was more directly and openly discussed as a concept in the year following Stern's article than it was in the year prior; (2) 'sex addiction' was discursively constructed as a male problem and regarded as an underlying reason for them to commit extramarital affairs; (3) in the year before Stern's article 'sex addiction' was discursively positioned as a social problem; and (4) in the year following Stern's article, 'sex addiction' was also discursively positioned as a medical problem. The paper concludes that the concept of 'sex addiction' is discursively constructed, and that Tiger Woods did, indeed, place a spotlight on the topic. As a result, the author argues that the media has a significant impact on the production, interpretation, and understanding of what many consider to be a sexual problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last decades, intersex studies has achieved increasing development as a field of critical knowledge, in tight collaboration with discourses developed by intersex activism and human rights bodies. This paper proposes a self-reflexive review of epistemological perspectives in intersex studies within broader discursive fields, through a thematic analysis and comparative framing analysis. This analysis is based on a narrative literature review of academic contributions, activist declarations, and documents issued by human rights bodies conducted over the last decade as a work-in-progress project. Furthermore, it includes results of a scoping review of recent knowledge production in intersex studies carried out in Scopus within the subject area 'social sciences'. This paper focuses on the analysis of the following epistemological perspectives: human rights frameworks, legal perspectives and citizenship theories, reflections on biopolitics, medicalization and iatrogenesis, sociology of diagnosis framework, depathologization perspective, respectful health care models, and reflections on epistemological, methodological, and ethical aspects. The literature review raises questions about the existence of specific intersex epistemologies in intersex studies, their interrelation with discourses contributed by intersex activism and human rights bodies, and the opportunities for a contribution of theory making in intersex studies to the human rights protection of intersex people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: Indigenous youth who identify themselves as First Nations, Métis or Inuit living in Canada between the ages of 12-25 experience higher rates of depression and suicide than non-Indigenous youth. Using narrative review, this paper provides a critical analysis of the scholarly literature to explore the current delivery and accessibility of mental health services among Indigenous youth and suggests areas for improvements in system recovery. Research Design and Methods: The narrative review selected papers from databases including Google Scholar, PubMed, APA PsychInfo, and Indigenous Peoples Atlas of Canada to capture literature from several academic disciplines between August 2020 to May 2022. Data was then synthesized to deliver broad perspectives on this topic. Results: Three categories describe how the accessibility of mental health services for Indigenous youth is impacted by (1) research, (2) current mental health practice, and (3) the location of care services. The medicalization of mental health services, and its emphasis on individual causation and intervention, grounded this discussion. Intersectionality and cultural safety offered a counterpoint to medicalization since these ideas encourage the consideration of social, political, economic, and historical forces. These concepts inform possibilities for change at the micro, mezzo, and macro system levels to address this growing issue. Conclusion: Future implications for improving mental health services and mental health recovery among Indigenous youth include advancing research and implementing innovative solutions that promote intersectionality and culturally safe care across multiple system levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Giami [[22]], in his concept paper, provides a very interesting analysis of the various forms of the medicalization of sexuality and gender, and demonstrates that medicalization is a very complex process, making a valuable addition to the literature. These articles represent the various forms of the medicalization of society, such as biobanks and biomedical research, the medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth, the medicalization and moralization of beauty and aging, the social construction of vaccination, the processes of medicalization and demedicalization, the depathologization and pharmacologization of sexuality, and the movement of medicalization critique, providing an insightful consideration of the range of complex aspects of medicalization processes and their implications for health and society. Medicalization has been a key concept in the field of the sociology of health and illness over the past 50 years, capturing the expanding social control of everyday life by medical experts [[1], [3]]. Cunha and Raposo [[23]], in their concept paper "A New Time of Reckoning, a Time for New Reckoning: Views on Health and Society, Tensions between Medicine and the Social Sciences, and the Process of Medicalization", provide an extensive and deep reflection with an enlarged knowledge-based orientation for standardizing the relationships between the health-illness-medicine complex and society. [Extracted from the article]

As a way forward in assessing how the Old Testament wisdom tradition might speak to decisions in a modern medical context, in this paper, I propose exploring the iconographic function of the "tree of life" in the Old Testament, which is consistently associated with both wisdom as well as life and health, in order to tease out two-related issues that can help in providing a Christian theological framework for thinking about the problem of the medicalization of risk: first, how should the natural and good human desire for health and long life be framed in terms of the pursuit of wisdom? And, second, how might a sapientially formed character approach risk and uncertainty in making medical decisions? The answers to these questions help establish a framework in which more specific questions related to the medicalization of risk can be assessed. As such, this paper is deliberately programmatic and perspectival rather than prescriptive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the struggles for legitimacy expressed by people with non-epileptic attack disorder (NEAD), one of the most common manifestations of functional neurological disorder presenting to emergency and secondary care services. Nonepileptic attacks are episodes of altered experience, awareness, and reduced self-control that superficially resemble epileptic seizures or other paroxysmal disorders but are not associated with physiological abnormalities sufficient to explain the semiological features. "Organic" or medicalized explanations are frequently sought by patients as the only legitimate explanation for symptoms, and consequently, a diagnosis of NEAD is often contested. Drawing on narrative interviews with patients from a small exploratory study and using a sociological perspective, we propose that a psychological account of NEAD does not provide a sufficiently legitimate path into a socially sanctioned sick role. This is a reflection of the dominance of biomedicine and the associated processes of medicalization. These processes are, we argue, the sole route to achieving legitimacy. The stress-based or psychologically oriented explanations offered to patients in contemporary medical models of the etiology of NEAD engender an uncertain identity and social position and fail to provide many patients with an account of the nature or origin of their symptoms that they find satisfactory or convincing. These struggles for legitimacy (shared by others with functional or somatoform conditions) are sharpened by key features of the contemporary healthcare landscape, such as the increasing framing of health through a lens of 'responsibilization'., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

The theoretical–conceptual article at hand explores how emotional discourses shape social relations by specifically focusing on the medicalization of disabled— and chronically ill—people's emotions. Medicalization is a concept from medical sociology that describes medicine's expansion into non-medical life areas, for instance into the realm of emotions, sometimes in order to challenge this expansion. The emotions of disabled people are often presented as a medicalized problem, rather than recognizing their embeddedness in a dis/ableist socio-cultural context. Such discourses instrumentalize feelings in order to individualize the responsibility for disability. For a contextualized and emancipatory approach, this study reviews papers on medicalized emotions from Disability Studies—a research program that can provide a rich archive of experiential accounts yet to be theorized through a comprehensive emotional perspective. The medicalization of disabled people's emotions can manifest in different ways: (1) In a dis/ableist society, able-mindedness is compulsory; i.e., we fail to question that a healthy mind is the norm and something to strive for unconditionally. This is also true on an emotional level; after all, some medical diagnoses are based on the wrong degree or temporality of emotionality. (2) Unpleasant feelings such as sadness are misunderstood as symptoms of impairment rather than effects of discrimination. (3) The expression of hurt feelings, e.g., related to discrimination, can easily be dismissed as hysterical. This assumption epistemologically disables patients. (4) Love and desire are delegitimized as fetish, for example, the desire for a disabled lover or the wish to start a family despite a chronic illness. The medicalization of disabled people's emotions individualizes and delegitimizes unpleasant emotions that emerge in a dis/ableist society. Different facets of medicalization enforce medical treatment instead, albeit in different ways. Disabled and sick people are cast as not feeling and desiring the right way, while hegemonic discourse prescribes psychological treatment against the effects of discrimination and bodily symptoms it cannot explain. Beyond the dismissal of disabled people's experience, adverse effects on healthcare delivery and health outcomes can be expected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Ethik in der Medizin is the property of Springer Nature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this paper I will develop a gender critique of scientific and medical idealizations of the human body and its health, which was performed out of gender and feminist studies, pointing also to women's art. In the discourses of medicine, healthy and beautiful human - and especially the female human - body is revealed as an ideological construction, an affective agent and a biopolitical ideal that controls and regulates gender differences. My intention is to demonstrate that the discourses of medicine, feminism, and art are in a dialogue historically in relation to these topics. Following Tasha N. Dubriwny's discussion of medical discourse and practice, I will map three phases in the development of Western medical discourses and point to the fact that they are in dialogue with feminist discourses and with the way how art treats and represents beautiful bodies, and/or sick bodies, with particular focus on female bodies. Discussion of the first phase of medical development points to the fact that visual art and photography were used to performatively help doctors to construct the female body as sick and deviant, as Didi Huberman showed. The second phase was the medicalization era, in which human bodies are expected to adhere to a standardized norm. In this period, within the framework of second wave feminism, feminist health activists appeared, forming the women's movement for health. Special attention will be directed to the third phase, the biomedicalization era or inclusion-and-difference paradigm, in which postfeminist discourses appeared and in relation to which I will discuss artworks by Hannah Wilke, Katarzyna Kozyra, and Orlan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australian law affirms a binary construction of fertility/infertility. This model is based upon the medical categorization of infertility as a disease. Law supports medicine in prioritizing technology, such as in vitro fertilization, as treatment for infertility. This prioritization of a medico-legal model of infertility in turn marginalizes alternative means of family creation such as adoption, fostering, traditional surrogacy, and childlessness. This paper argues that this binary model masks the impact of medicalization upon reproductive choice and limits opportunity for infertile individuals to create families. While medical technology should be available to enhance reproductive opportunity, infertile individuals will benefit from regulatory change which disentangles the medico-legal construct of infertility as a disease from the desire to create a family. This paper suggests that the medico-legal model of infertility should be reframed to support all opportunities for family creation equally, including non-medical opportunities such as adoption, fostering, and childlessness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically synthesizes leading edge scholarship on neurodiversity, arguing that sociology could expand its account for the relationship between self and society through attention to the (a)social practices of those constructed as neurologically disabled. Autistic scholar‐activism birthed the neurodiversity paradigm, which claims respect for neurological diversity and its social manifestations. Sexual and gender variation are among those. I review research on the confluence of neurological, sexual, and gender variance, pointing to opportunities for documenting the roles of social institutions in constructing and regulating divergent bodyminds, as well as new intersectional identities and social movements. Next, I synthesize nascent literature developing neuroqueer theory. "Neuroqueer" articulates the queer nature of neurodivergence and examines the entwinement of the two. Centering the epistemic authority of bodyminds problematized as lacking self‐control/intent, perspective‐taking, and reliance on the social symbolic, neuroqueer scholars forward (a)social ways of knowing, communicating, communing, and being human. Focusing on neuronormativity, interdependent with better‐recognized normativities (e.g., gender, ethnicity, etc.), neuroqueer theory offers fresh perspective on how dominant concepts and relations render some bodyminds problematic—legitimate objects of exclusion, marginalization, and "rehabilitation." In doing so, it troubles sociological ideas about agency, sociality, communication, and what it means to be/have a (social) self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The medicalization of risk rests on foundational assumptions shared by economics and public health. Economists, however, think in terms of pursuing an array of goods, and hence, they offer useful critiques of the irrationality involved in trying to subordinate all goods to one narrow good, like avoiding death from a particular disease. Many of our approaches to health do not appear to be fully rational, suggesting that the deeper motivation lying behind our concerns about health are to be found in something other than the impulse to extend human lives as much as possible. This paper draws on the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas to sketch a richer way of thinking about the goods we pursue in health care that can help us to avoid the pitfalls associated with the medicalization of risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assisted reproductive technologies have expanded vastly and are frequently addressed using the language of revolution. The last two decades witnessed important transformations in Spanish repromarkets, some of which are linked to one freezing technique: vitrification. This cryotechnique tends to be presented by professionals as revolutionary as well, even if in a humbler way: a technique with the capacity to revolutionize reproductive labs. Celebrated for its ability to freeze oocytes, the introduction and assimilation of vitrification have implied many transformations in Spanish clinics and the broader reproductive industry in Spain. This paper describes the role of vitrification from the point of view of the labs, drawing on interviews with professionals and observations of laboratory work, and focusing on the changes, which include but are not restricted to freezing oocytes. I argue that vitrification has increased the role of cryopreservation in reproductive labs overall in Spain, expanding the use of strategic, short-term freezing of embryos. This is discussed as part of a "cryomedicalized" turn, using Charlotte Kroløkke and Anna Sofie Bach's term, which enlarges the scope of medicalization through optimization and prevention, in the context of late reproduction and a strong reproductive market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the social construction process of the Covid-19 pandemic from the perspective of the anxiety and frustration felt by the citizens as a threat to their own lives and health and to analyze the perceived severity of the Covid-19 infection during March-June 2020. The present research aims to understand the changes that society is going through in the context of the pandemic, to analyze the social construction elements of the pandemic and the infodemic, in the context of a public health crisis, and also to identify the social perception on the pandemic among the affected population. Social anxiety can be understood: as a side effect of the process of social construction of the person's identity, thus being correlated with the cultural particularities of the social environment of origin, mainly related to the social distinctions between individualism and collectivism; as an instance for the social construction of the idea of pandemic; as a constructive instance for the medicalization of social life in the pandemic and post-pandemic period; as being socially constructed through the mechanisms of the interpretive adrift of the meaning of role performance. The research was carried out between March and June 2020 and it was based on a qualitative methodology derived from Grounded Theory. Data collection was done through the technique of a semi-structured interview, applied online on a sample of 103 people, mostly in the N.E. Region of Romania using an opportunity sample based on the snowball method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the philosophical debate on aging, it is common to raise the question of the theoretical definition of aging in terms of its possible characterization as a disease. Understanding aging as a disease seems to imply its medicalization, which has important practical consequences. In this paper, we analyze the question of whether aging is a disease by appealing to the concept of disease in the philosophy of medicine. As a result of this analysis, we argue that a pragmatist approach to the conception of disease is the best alternative to highlight the relevance of the medicalization of aging. From this pragmatist perspective, it can be seen that the notion of aging is going through a conceptual change, and aging can today be understood as a not radically different process from any other condition that is usually considered a disease., (© The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press, on behalf of the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy Inc. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.)

Background: The post-partum consumption of the placenta by the mother (placentophagy) has been practiced since the 1970s in the global North and is seemingly increasing in popularity. Maternal placentophagy is not known to have been practiced in any other time period or culture, despite being near-ubiquitous in other placental mammals. An in-depth qualitative exploration as to the reasons for the practice, its increasing popularity and how it is narratively incorporated into discourses surrounding "ideal" natural and medical births are given in this paper.Methods: 1752 posts from 956 users across 85 threads from the parenting forums Mumsnet and Netmums were identified for inclusion. A thematic discourse analysis was performed using NVivo.Results: Three main themes were identified: women recounted predominantly positive attitudes towards their own experiences of placentophagy, and they were respectful of others' views and experiences; some had negative views, particularly around the concept of disgust, but again, they were respectful of others' experiences. By far the most common method of consumption of the placenta was encapsulation.Conclusions: This paper identifies the motivation for placentophagy to almost universally be for medical benefits, most commonly the prevention or treatment of post-natal depression (PND). Whilst disgust is a common reaction, discussion of risks is rare, and positive experiences outweigh negative ones. The increasing popularity of the practice is ascribed in part to the comparative palatability of encapsulation and the use of the internet to share resources and remove barriers. Parenting forums are important spaces to negotiate normative birth practices, including placentophagy, and act to build communities of women who value personal experience over medical evidence and highly value personal choice and bodily autonomy. Placentophagy is discussed in terms of its relation to natural and medical births with arguments being made using both discourses for and against the practice. This paper argues that placentophagy is practiced as a resistance to medicalisation as an assertion of control by the mother, whilst simultaneously being a medicalised phenomenon itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Excited Delirium Syndrome" (ExDS) is a controversial diagnosis. The supposed syndrome is sometimes considered to be a potential cause of death. However, it has been argued that its sole purpose is to cover up excessive police violence because it is mainly used to explain deaths of individuals in custody. In this paper, we examine the epistemic conditions giving rise to the controversial diagnosis by discussing the relation between causal hypotheses, evidence, and data in forensic medicine. We argue that the practitioners' social context affects causal inquiry through background assumptions that enter inquiry at multiple stages. This analysis serves to better understand the wide usage of the controversial diagnosis of ExDS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The COVID-19 outbreak has shifted the course in the global health debate further towards health security and biomedical issues. Even though global health had already played a growing role in the international policy agenda, the pandemic strongly reinforced the interest of the media, the general public and the community in cross-border infectious diseases. This led to a strengthening of the already dominant biomedical understanding of global health and the securitization of health in foreign policy. Methods: This paper critically provides a narrative, iterative review of the health security literature available to date, with a special focus on the development of the currently prevailing concept of health security and the dual trend towards the securitization and biomedicalization of global health. Findings: In a world increasingly determined by power asymmetries, unequal distribution of opportunities and resources, and inadequate governance structures, securitizing health has become a key feature of global governance. Health security is predominantly based on a concept that neglects the global burden of disease determined by non-communicable conditions rather than by infectious diseases. Moreover, it exhibits a trend towards biomedical solutions and neglects root causes of global health crises. Conclusions: As important as health security is, the underlying concept driven by biomedical and technocratic reductionism falls short. It widely neglects the social, economic, political, commercial and environmental determination of health. Beyond improved health care and prevention, health-in-all policies are ultimately required for ensuring health security and reducing one of its main challenges, health inequalities within and between countries. Global health security must first and foremost seek to guarantee the universal right to health and therefore emphasise the social, economic, commercial and political determination of health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medicalization is a central topic of concern in the sociology of disability and of health and illness. In this paper, I examine how medicalization is inequitably applied and circulates in the context of schools, specifically in serving students with educational disabilities. My aim is to advance understandings of medicalization through this case. Using a mixed-methods design, I first show, descriptively, how race and gender intersectionally predict educational disability status in a dataset of all Wisconsin public school students. Next, I examine how racial and gender disparities in disability status are produced at the micro level, using interviews with 27 Wisconsin teachers, including in-depth discussions of 73 individual students that were struggling academically or behaviorally. My quantitative findings show variation by race, gender, and disability category: White children have higher probability of special education receipt than comparable children of color for academic difficulties, but lower probability for behavioral difficulties, and girls have lower probability than comparable boys overall. My interview data suggest that these disparate outcomes reflect stratified medicalization processes, in which institutional constraints, status beliefs, and cultural discourses of race and gender shape both stratified noticing of schooling difficulties and stratified interpretation of those difficulties as medicalized conditions., (Copyright © 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

The current moralistic take on adolescent sexuality in Brazil raises the importance of sexual citizenship when examining adolescent fertility policies. Literature on the capacity contract lends a useful lens for understanding the ramifications of the construction of adolescents as sexual citizens. This paper investigates how the conceptualisation of adolescents within the capacity contract may relate to the problematisation of adolescent pregnancy in Brazil. To investigate this, I conduct a Foucauldian discourse analysis of federal level documents. These pertain to adolescent sexual and reproductive health programmes, guidelines and a campaign between 1989 and 2020. To examine the visibility of adolescents and adolescent pregnancy, I conduct a content analysis of health indicators and surveys from health registries from the same period. My evidence shows that adolescents found themselves in contradictory and dynamic positions within the capacity contract. Notably, when adolescents were attributed less agency, they were governed more paternalistically. Their choices and vulnerabilities regarding fertility seemed then more likely to be ignored. I conclude that this way in which adolescents were constructed as sexual citizens may have hindered a holistic policy approach to adolescent pregnancy. This highlights how the capacity contract falls short of protecting those deemed incapable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, the phenomenon of grief, when you lose a loved one, has been the subject of exploration and discussion among researchers. Because of this, prolonged grief is now recognized as a possible mental disorder as the latest version of the diagnosis manual; 'International Classification of Diseases' (ICD‐11) being published in 2018 is featuring a new diagnosis called 'prolonged grief disorder'. The commencement of this new disorder indicates a shift in the way grief is being articulated why the notion of rupture from the French philosopher Michel Foucault is applied as a philosophical approach in this paper. A Foucault‐inspired discourse analysis has been prepared and by considering the issue historically and tracing how the concept of grief has been articulated in different time periods throughout history, the aim is to map out the discursive transformation that has taken place and to gain insight into how the societal context has supported and enabled this transformation. This paper takes a historical look back from the 1800s to present and identifies when changes can be observed in the way grief is being articulated. These changes or ruptures are identified in the work of Søren Aabye Kierkegaard, Sigmund Freud and Margaret Stroebe & Henk Schut who all must be assumed to have contributed significantly to how grief is perceived in various historical time periods. The discourse analysis identifies how prominent thinkers have articulated grief in each period and how today's perception of grief, as a possible mental disorder, both relates to these prominent thinkers but also reflects dominant societal values and ideologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is concerned with the substantive nature of late capitalism, which determines all spheres of social existence. It is clarified that neoliberal ideology forms a special type of socio-cultural relations, in which the politics' technocratic nature disregards humanitarian and cultural aspects and doubts the very existence of the social. Under the circumstances of IT intensified development and real crisis of capitalism, the fundamental process of human-human interaction is ignored, consequently resulting in the loss of the human's fundamental feature, that is, his sociality. Socio-philosophical research in modern realities is assigned to actualize the issues of spiritual production related to preservation of the social as the ontological essence of society existence in the future. Therefore, our paper aims to analyze the socio-productive function of education and medicine in the formation of a humanitarian and anthropological model of preserving social partnership and tolerance in modern society as opposed to the disappointing and disturbing experience of chronic social pathologies, medicalization and formation of the "remission society" model within the framework of capitalism. The formation of a humanitarian and anthropological model of preserving the social consists in actualizing the evolutionary mechanisms for social humanism, which is the basic characteristic of the post-capitalist reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Like the human mind, the human body is the medium by which we represent ourselves, whether we are patients or healthcare providers. This paper concerns the significance of understanding the existential phenomenological side of a patient's body within healthcare. To care for a patient's body, one needs to be aware of how the body appears to itself, to others, and in a larger environmental reality. We think and feel and observe the world with our body, especially with the brain and nervous system, but also with other dimensions of the body manifesting itself as a somatic tonus. The healthcare providers' body does not only represent a profession, but also who they are as a person and what kind of environment by which they are affected. The same applies to patients' bodies. As a medium for experiencing, a medium inseparable from our very being, our physical body functions as a surface open to and in contact with the healthcare environment that surrounds it. In the modern healthcare regime, the human body is nearly always visible and under constant surveillance. In the environment of control and visibility, bodies become medicalized, psychologized, and normalized to fit into sociocultural demands of economic and structural adaptations, social participation and communication, which in certain situations seem hostile to the ideology of care, freedom, and humanity. We should realize that our ethical concepts and norms, even the very notion of humanity, depend on social forms of life involving the ways we experience our bodies in different medical and sociocultural situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gender differences in the prevalence of psychiatric disorders, with higher prevalence of mood and anxiety disorders among women, have been the focus of much debate. In Iran, the adoption of the construct of Bipolar Spectrum Disorder (BSD) and of the concept of "soft bipolarity" has been associated with a large gender difference in rates of diagnosis. This paper discusses the gendered meanings of the diagnosis of BSD in Iran. In this qualitative study, we conducted 25 in-depth semi-structured interviews with prominent psychiatrists and university professors (7 female and 18 male) at six different universities in Iran and 37 in-depth semi-structured interviews with patients (23 female and 14 male, 18–55 years of age) who had received bipolar spectrum disorder diagnosis and treatment, excluding Bipolar I. Findings suggest that the high rate of diagnosis of bipolar spectrum disorder (i.e., subthreshold or soft bipolar disorder) among women in Iran is influenced by gender, sociocultural, political, and economic factors, as well as the diagnostic practices of biomedical psychiatry. The dominant biological psychiatry system in Iran has led many psychiatrists to frame sociopolitically and culturally rooted forms of distress in terms of biomedical categories like soft bipolarity and to limit their interventions to medication. This bioreductionist approach silences the voices of vulnerable groups, including those of women, and marginalizes discussions of problematic institutional and social power. To understand the preference for biomedical explanations, we need to consider not only the economic interests at play in the remaking of human identity in terms of biological being and the globalization of biological psychiatry, but also the resistance to addressing the sociocultural, political, and economic determinants of women's mental suffering in particular contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of International Journal of Filologia is the property of International Journal of Filologia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Diagnoses are powerful tools that fulfill various practical and symbolic functions. In this paper, I examine how a contested diagnosis called orthorexia nervosa has been taken up by users on Instagram, where tens of thousands of posts engage with the topic, many of them from individuals who identify with the condition. I put scholarship on medicalization and diagnosis in conversation with literature on subcultures to foreground the subversive work that is enabled through this diagnosis. Drawing on more than 350 hours of online ethnographic fieldwork and 34 in-depth interviews, I examine how participants construct a shared identity, draw on common language and norms, and undertake collective practices, as they negotiate dominant understandings of health. I show how they draw on the legitimacy endowed by the diagnostic label to validate and make sense of experiences of suffering but also to counter dominant health-seeking discourses, practices, and aesthetics in an online space where these are highly visible and valued. I also discuss some ways Instagram as a digital platform shapes its uptake by this community in meaningful ways. On the one hand, participants draw heavily on the language and framing of medicine to make sense of their fraught experiences with food and their bodies, effectively advocating for the medicalization of their own suffering while also creating a sense of community and shared identity. However, on the other hand, they actively use the diagnosis and the recovery process enabled through it to effectively resignify dominant beliefs, values, and practices that are experienced as injurious, including some that are particularly prevalent on Instagram. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Since the 1980s, markets have turned increasingly to intangible goods - healthcare, education, the arts, and justice. Over 40 years, the authors investigated healthcare commoditisation to produce policy knowledge relevant to patients, physicians, health professionals, and taxpayers. This paper revisits their objectives, methods, and results to enlighten healthcare policy design and research.Main Text: This paper meta-analyses the authors' research that evaluated the markets impact on healthcare and professional culture and investigated how they influenced patients' timely access to quality care and physicians' working conditions. Based on these findings, they explored the political economic of healthcare. In low-income countries the analysed research showed that, through loans and cooperation, multilateral agencies restricted the function of public services to disease control, with subsequent catastrophic reductions in access to care, health de-medicalisation, increased avoidable mortality, and failure to attain the narrow MDGs in Africa. The pro-market reforms enacted in middle-income countries entailed the purchaser-provider split, privatisation of healthcare pre-financing, and government contracting of health finance management to private insurance companies. To establish the materiality of a cause-and-effect relationship, the authors compared the efficiency of Latin American national health systems according to whether or not they were pro-market and complied with international policy standards. While pro-market health economists acknowledge that no market can offer equitable access to healthcare without effective regulation and control, the authors showed that both regulation and control were severely constrained in Asia by governance and medical secrecy issues. In high-income countries they questioned the interest for population health of healthcare insurance companies, whilst comparing access to care and health expenditures in the European Union vs. the U.S., the Netherlands, and Switzerland. They demonstrated that commoditising healthcare increases mortality and suffering amenable to care considerably and carries professional, cultural, and ethical risks for doctors and health professionals. Pro-market policies systems cause health systems inefficiency, inequity in access to care and strain professionals' ethics.Conclusion: Policy research methodologies benefit from being inductive, as health services and systems evaluations, and population health studies are prerequisites to challenge official discourse and to explore the historical, economic, sociocultural, and political determinants of public policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 has had dramatic effects on both the health and economic stability of countries around the world. While several scholars and media commentators have suggested that the pandemic would be a good time to reset an unsustainable tourism system, left out of these discussions has been the impacts on religion and religious travel. The purpose of this paper is to review the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on religion and religious travel, including the tensions that have arisen between religious communities, governments and health officials. The paper then discusses potential futures regarding religious travel in a post-COVID-19 and postsecular world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how parents of children diagnosed with autism resist the medicalization of their children's behavior. Drawing on video and ethnographic data collected over four years of fieldwork at a clinic for developmental disorders, the paper distinguishes two orders of practice - that of the clinic and that of the family - and argues that behavior which is interpreted as disordered in the clinic may be seen as ordinary in the home. These different interpretations reflect and renew distinct orders of sensemaking in the clinic and home, and parents may mobilize familial knowledge of the child to counter the medicalization of specific behavior patterns, even where they otherwise accept an autism diagnosis. In showing how medicalization and labelling are achieved and resisted in the mundane details of social interaction, the paper contributes to studies of diagnosis, disability, and deviance. Further, the myriad ways parents and clinicians contest which regions of a child's behavior get medicalized - i.e. which behavioral patterns are labeled disordered - present a challenge to binary conceptions of medicalization, recommending instead a more nuanced model of medicalization as a multi-dimensional continuum: more or less, rather than either-or., (Copyright © 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Our paper addresses the so-called college mental health crisis and the adoption of the strategy of mindfulness-based interventions. We offer a critique of their underlying medical–therapeutic paradigm by engaging the notion of self-transcendence in Viktor Frankl's Existential Analysis and Buddhism in dialogue. We argue that the current mindfulness movement has decontextualized and appropriated mindfulness from its Buddhist foundations in favor of a model that offers objectively verifiable biophysical and mental benefits. Self-transcendence, whether from the perspective of Buddhism or Frankl's work, offers what we feel is an existentially viable path forward for college students, in lieu of the current paradigm promoted by those advocating use of these mindfulness-based interventions. We conclude by considering Existential and Buddhist notions of self-transcendence in dialogue, suggesting they offer an educational practice worthy of implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tibet's wild fungus cordyceps (Ophiocordyceps sinensis), a prized commodity in metropolitan China, has been undergoing changes in the way it is traded and marketed in Tibet. Prized as a medicinal tonic and high-value gift, the parasitic fungus has traditionally been traded in its dried form. However, in recent years we have observed the emergence of trade in fresh cordyceps. This paper seeks to make sense of this change in the form of this commodity and its correlation to changing meanings of cordyceps in China. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Tibet and textual analysis of online markets in China, this paper argues that this transformation is associated with China's anticorruption campaigns, the rising importance of e-commerce infrastructures, and the biomedicalization of cordyceps through advancing biotechnologies. In addition, we argue that professional brokers play a key role in the emergence of the fresh cordyceps trade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Memorandum: Memória e História em Psicologia is the property of Memorandum: Memoria e Historia em Psicologia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper is a review of the volume "Bioethics in crisis or the crisis of bioethics? A philosophy of the pandemic in the medicalized society", authored by Antonio Sandu (LUMEN Publishing House, 2020) and aims to highlight those innovative aspects in the field of bioethics. Bioethics in crisis or the crisis of bioethics? A philosophy of the pandemic in the medicalized society" is the only volume published in Romania that debates the issue of the SARS-VOC-2 virus pandemic exclusively in the field of bioethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The prevalence of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) diagnoses and medication use has increased over time around the world, but significant regional differences remain. This paper aims to determine and explain disparities in ADHD prevalence and medication use among school-aged children in two distinct school systems, in Flanders (Belgium) and Québec (Canada). We present detailed descriptive and comparative analyses of data from 35 schools, 114 teachers, and 1046 parents (children) that were collected as part of a comparative international project. The data concern teacher and parent suspicions, teachers' ratings of ADHD-related behaviors in children, teachers' views of medication use, and teachers' beliefs about ADHD. The results show that, compared with Flanders, Québec had significantly more children diagnosed with ADHD and more frequent suspicions of ADHD in children by teachers and parents. We refer to the conceptual, institutional, and interactional levels of medicalization to interpret our findings and conclude that social and cultural readings of children's behaviors differ greatly between regions. Medicalization of children's behaviors is more common in Québec than in Flanders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]