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"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]

Medicalization is increasingly recognized as a bidirectional process, with patients and their families as agents. The paper considers the specific case of the medicalization of autism in Italy, from the point of view of parents of autistic people with different levels of support needs. Through reporting and comparing results of two independently conducted qualitative studies, this paper aims to analyze how parents embrace and resist the medicalization of autism in their everyday lives and in healthcare contexts. Both studies involved participant-observation with services that targeted autistic people and interviews with parents, professionals, and autistic people. Results show that parents of autistic people both embrace and resist medicalization. While parents (sometimes ambivalently) accept the responsibilization inherent in their engagement with interventions (a sort of "therapeutization" of life) and reject lay expertise by deferring to experts' knowledge, they also resist the application of medical labels, language and practices in various ways in their everyday lives. Both embracing and resisting medicalization can be useful for achieving overarching social goals of being a good parent, helping their children, and pursuing respect and social harmony. Medicalization derives not only from the cultural dominance of medical discourses, which seems to incorporate resistance to medicalization stances, but also from the absence of continuity and coordination of services, particularly in the Italian context of public (but increasingly privatizing) health and welfare services. • Parents accept the responsibilization inherent in medicalization and resist it. • Both embracing and resisting medicalization is useful for achieving social goals. • Medicalization is due to the cultural dominance of medicine. • Medicalization also derives from the absence of continuity of services. • Cultural and biopolitical context impact on how people engage with medicalization. [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. • The interaction order of the clinic medicalizes behavior that may be seen as benign in other settings. • Parents resist medicalization of children's behavior by drawing on personal knowledge of the child. • Medicalization is not all or nothing, but is negotiated at the level of individual behavior. • Even where a diagnosis is accepted, parents may reject the medicalization of specific behaviors. • Parents can reveal the sensibility of children's behavior in which clinicians see only deficits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an examination of the process used by ordinary courts in Chile when making legal capacity determinations. It provides an up-to-date account of various aspects of law and procedure related to legal capacity in this jurisdiction. Also, by drawing on semi-structured interviews with judges, this paper examines judicial understandings of legal capacity decision-making focusing on problems related to the medicalisation of mental disability and the participation of persons with disabilities in legal capacity procedures. [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. • White children and boys are more likely than comparable peers to receive special education for higher-status disabilities. • Children of color and boys are more likely than comparable peers to receive special education for lower-status disabilities. • These inequalities are explained by stratified definitional processes of medicalization by teachers. • Institutional constraints and cultural discourses of race and gender shape stratified medicalization processes. • These processes include stratified noticing and stratified interpretation of students' difficulties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The way newspapers frame infectious disease outbreaks and their connection to the environmental determinants of disease transmission matter because they shape how we understand and respond to these major events. In 2017, following an unexpected climatic event named "El Niño Costero," a dengue epidemic in Peru affected over seventy-five thousand people. This paper examines how the Peruvian news media presented dengue, a climate-sensitive disease, as a public health problem by analyzing a sample of 265 news stories on dengue from two major newspapers published between January 1st and December 31st of 2017. In analyzing the construction of responsibility for the epidemic, I find frames that blamed El Niño Costero's flooding and Peru's poorly prepared cities and public health infrastructure as the causes of the dengue outbreak. However, when analyzing frames that offer solutions to the epidemic, I find that news articles call for government-led, short-term interventions (e.g., fogging) that fail to address the decaying public health infrastructure and lack of climate-resilient health systems. Overall, news media tended to over-emphasize dengue as requiring technical solutions that ignore the root causes of health inequality and environmental injustice that allow dengue to spread in the first place. This case speaks to the medicalization of public health and to a long history of disease-control programs in the Global South that prioritized top-down technical approaches, turning attention away from the social and environmental determinants of health, which are particularly important in an era of climate change. • Analyzes 265 articles on Peru's 2017 dengue outbreak following El Niño Costero. • Finds that individualizing narratives are not as prevalent as seen in past studies. • However, calls for government action still emphasize short-term technical solutions. • In particular, eco-social approaches to prevent transmission were overlooked. • Concludes that this narrow view on public health still reflects medicalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]