Search

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]

Childbirth is widely recognized to be among the most painful of experiences, and the most common and effective pain relief for birthing women is known to be the use of epidural analgesia. The increase in the use of epidural analgesia for birthing women has been described by some critics as a by-product of the medicalized model of birth, although there remains a notable dearth of research regarding women's experiences of epidurals. The present paper seeks to address this research gap by examining how first-time mothers in Iceland discuss their intentions concerning pain relief during birth, along with how they construct childbirth-related pain and the use of epidural analgesia in the context of a midwife-led model of care and an institutionalized preference for "natural" birth. The findings demonstrate that, despite initial intentions, most of the women end up having an epidural, and most describe their epidurals as both wonderful and immensely helpful. The dominant narrative about "natural" childbirth being preferable is not fully refuted by this. Instead, the women either align themselves with the ideology of the capable and knowing body or resist and contest this narrative by constructing their birthing bodies as open to, and in need of, assistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares changing patterns of science news over a period of 50 years. The study analyses a biannual corpus of 2800 news articles in Britain (the Daily Telegraph) and 5800 in Bulgaria (Rabotnichesko Delo), and shows divergent and convergent trends. Britain carries considerably more science news than Bulgaria all through the period, while the coverage shows parallel swings: increasing intensity during the 1950s, a turning point in the early 1960s, declining into the 1970s, and rising again in the 1980s and 1990s. Media coverage in both countries shows similar swings in public appeal. The trends in the medicalization of science news, the reporting of controversy and the evaluation of science diverge in the two contexts. The paper concludes with speculative explanations of these results. Similarities and differences in these long-term trends point to common factors and specific differences at work on either side of the (former) 'Iron Curtain'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines contemporary Ukrainian psychiatry through the voices of patients, practitioners, and advocates, focusing on shifting objects of knowledge, interventions, and institutional transitions. Currently, we are witnessing the reconfiguration of psychiatry on a global scale through neoliberal rhetoric combined with the call for global mental health. The goal of the movement for global mental health is to scale up psychiatric treatments through greater access to psychiatric drugs, justified through the framing of distress as an illness. Neoliberal rhetoric suggests that cutting social service expenditure through the privatization and decentralization of the health care system will stimulate economic growth and, in the long term, combat poverty. This paper traces how these dynamics are playing out in Ukraine, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at a psychiatric hospital in south-central Ukraine from 2008–2010, while working with a non-governmental organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In conjunction with the growing feminist literature on pregnancy and visualization, this paper uses Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic to demonstrate how the effort to make the interior of the pregnant body visible in medical discourse was a crucial part of the development of the modern medical gaze. In doing so I develop two concurrent arguments. First, I argue that the pathological corpse of the Clinic can conceptually serve as a double for the pregnant body as it emerged in modern medicine in the 20th century. At the same time I use the insights of the Clinic to illustrate changes in pregnancy from early modernity to the 20th century. In early modernity, the pregnant body was understood in terms of generation, as a tree that bears fruit; by the 19th century, the pregnant body was a machine that reproduced the species. This transition can be seen in the overlap of pathology and pregnancy in early modernity, an overlap that continued throughout the 19 century and is inadvertently reinforced through the practice of ultrasound. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

What role do the media play in the medicalization of sleep problems? This article, based on a British Academy funded project, uses qualitative textual analysis to examine representations of insomnia and snoring in a large representative sample of newspaper articles taken from the UK national press from the mid-1980s to the present day. Constructed as 'common problems' in the population at large, insomnia and snoring we show are differentially located in terms of medicalizing-healthicizing discourses and debates. Our findings also suggest important differences in the gendered construction of these problems and in terms of tabloid and 'broadsheet' newspaper coverage of these issues. Newspaper constructions of sleep, it is concluded, are complex, depending on both the 'problem7 and the paper in question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the emergence and development of gerontology in communist Bulgaria, looking at the interplay of various circumstances: scientific and political, national and international. We ask if an apparently ideologically neutral field of knowledge such as gerontology may have had some intrinsic qualities imbued by the regimes of knowledge production under a communist regime. More specifically, we ask to what extent and in which ways the production of such specialized, putatively universal knowledge could be ideologically driven and/or politically controlled. To this end, we unpack the ideological, political, institutional, and epistemic circumstances that may have affected the emergence, the institutionalization, and the paradigm of Bulgarian gerontology. We focus in on the social actors, both individuals and organizations, and the roles they played in the process, as well as on international networking and the uses of international contacts and agendas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emerging from a diverse and long history of shamanic and religious cultural practices, psychedelic substances are increasingly being foregrounded as medicines by an assemblage of scientific research groups, media institutions, government drug authorities, and patient and consumer populations. Considering scientific studies and recent popular media associated with the medicalization of psychedelic substances, this article responds to scholarly debates over the imbrication of scientific knowledge and moral discourse. It contends that, while scientific research into psychedelic medicine presents itself as amoral and objective, it often reverts to moral and political claims in public discourse. We illustrate how psychedelic medicine discourse in recent popular media in the United States and the United Kingdom is naturalizing specific moral and political orientations as pharmacological and healthy. The article traces how psychedelic substances have become ego-dissolving medicines invested with neoliberal and anti-authoritarian agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past decade, food security and nutrition practices have become central in the promotion of resilience in protracted crises. Such approaches have been welcomed by the aid community because of their potential for linking relief and development. Social and political analysts, however, have criticized resilience approaches for failing to consider power relations and because they entail an acceptance of crisis or repeated risk. In this context, regimes of food security and nutrition practices have become increasingly targeted, privatized and medicalized, focussing on individual behaviour and responsibility rather than responsibility of the state or international actors. This article uses examples from Sudan to examine how and why the resilience 'regime of practices' has functioned as a form of neoliberal governmentality, and argues that it has created a fantasy in which conflict in Darfur is invisible. This allowed food aid to be withdrawn and removed the need for protection despite ongoing conflict and threats to livelihoods; thus crisis-affected populations have been abandoned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the social studies of children and childhood, children's humor is an under-explored area. In this article, I explore the use of humor by children diagnosed with severe obesity while attending long-term rehabilitation together with their families. In the children's use of humor, I found a transition from the use of "fat jokes" to "biopedagogical humor," which involved jokes about instructions related to food and physical activity as conveyed by members of the rehabilitation team. I interpret their humor as signifying how they were affected by the biopedagogical messages involved in treatment and how they started self-monitoring their food intake and physical activity. I claim that their humor also can point to a process of medicalization of their condition, where their understanding of themselves as "fat" was replaced by "I suffer from obesity." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article illustrates how medicalized epistemologies and methodologies significantly influence the institutional ethical review processes applied to sociolegal research in law schools. It argues this development has elevated particular renderings of mental distress and objectivity to universal definitions, potentially placing a straitjacket on methodological innovation. The authors use two case studies from their experiences as researchers in a UK Law School, alongside a small-scale survey of sociolegal researchers in other UK law schools, to illustrate the problems that can arise in securing ethical approval for sociolegal research, in particular with participatory research designs that mobilize ideas of mental distress and objectivity not premised on conventional medical understandings. The article develops key proposals that the authors feel merit further inquiry. First, there should be a comprehensive evaluation of how the jurisdiction of ethical review for sociolegal research is established. Second, sociolegal scholarship can contribute to debates concerning the discursive, material and procedural constitution of institutional ethics approval processes. Finally, we might rethink the nature of, and relationship between, university-based research ethics committees and National Health Service research ethics committees, by placing both within wider ecologies of capacities for ethical decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional western conceptions of pain have commonly associated pain with the inability to communicate and with the absence of the self. Thus pain, it seems, must be avoided, since it is to blame for alienating the body from subjectivity and the self from others. Recent work on pain, however, has began to challenge these assumptions, mainly by discerning between different kinds of pain and by pointing out how some forms of pain might even constitute a crucial element in the production of subjectivity. This article deals with the specific form of pain that is labour pain. Pain in labour has been investigated in medicine and lately, copiously, within the social sciences. Analyses from a more philosophical perspective are still very much missing, however, and in developing such analyses, de Beauvoir’s ideas on subjectivity as inherently embodied, as situated, and as profoundly ambiguous when authentically lived, appear to be of significant use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Celebrity gossip blogs, some with millions of readers, are important sites for the interactive construction of addiction. The highly editorial nature of these blogs combined with their low bar to participation make them ideal sites to study how bloggers and readers interpret celebrity drug use. Through a case study of the widely known gossip blogger Perez Hilton’s coverage of actress Lindsay Lohan’s legal troubles, and reader responses to these stories, I show how interactive discussion of celebrity reinforces dominant constructions of habitual drug use as a form of badness and sickness best treated with jail and coerced treatment. Overall, I argue that new media forms such as celebrity gossip blogs are unlikely but important sites of social problem construction, maintenance and reinvigoration. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Informed by recent feminist critiques of the notion of depression, we explored how a group of South African low-income mothers who have been diagnosed with depression subjectively describe and explain their psychological distress. Working within a feminist materialist-discursive framework, we focused both on the explicit content of what the women were saying and on the implicit or underlying discourses that informed their narratives. Our findings suggest that respondents often subjectively experienced their psychological distress as anger, which was also articulated in violence directed at their children. This suggests that not only does the diagnosis of depression serve to medicalize the distress of participants, but it may simultaneously serve to obscure their anger at having to mother in adverse conditions. In exploring reasons for their anger, we found that participants were frustrated with trying to live up to idealized notions of motherhood in impoverished contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent writings that critically analyze psychiatric diagnostic categories and the practices that are intertwined with them have descriptive, contextualizing and moral dimensions. Descriptive projects depict major trends in psychiatric classification. They focus on three such trends: medicalization, an increase in both the number of diagnostic categories and the number of persons to whom they are ascribed, and a move towards framing both pathological and normative behaviors and experiences in neurobiological terms. Contextualizing projects explore how micro- and macrosocial, cultural and political economic elements influence both how diagnostic categories take form and how people who live under the description of those categories interact with them. Many descriptive and contextualizing projects also have a moral dimension: they are motivated by questions about what constitutes help for mentally distressed or impaired persons as well as by concerns that some diagnostic labels and practices may cause harm. Such critical consciousness seems to have grown in tandem with increased medicalization and biological reductionism in psychiatry, and should be further promoted in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how feminist politics are made to ‘stick’ to appropriated technologies in the context of a contemporary feminist women’s health clinic in the US. Feminist clinics such as ‘FemHealth’, founded as part of 1970s women’s health movements, put medical tools and knowledge into lay women’s hands, making the appropriation of medical technologies a centerpiece of their political project. In the process, they rejected the authority of physicians and gave new politicized meanings to the tools they claimed as their own. As lay healthworkers at FemHealth continued the project of appropriation, they also continued to negotiate their dependence on physicians to perform tasks that required a medical license. Drawing on participant observation and interviews with healthworkers, I argue that struggles over the role and authority of physicians in this clinic play out through debates over two similar and competing tools used in the abortion procedure: the single-tooth tenaculum and the cervical stabilizer. Many healthworkers invested in the stabilizer as ‘inherently feminist’ in hopes that it would maintain its politics even when passed into physicians’ hands. While appropriation depends on the ability of users to alter a technology’s meanings, actors may feel invested in the new politics taken on by appropriated tools and work towards making those meanings persist, or ‘stick’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyzes the rise and fall of a public health ‘fact’ in the US: the assertion that gay men’s Viagra use is inherently recreational and increases STD risk. Extending the science studies argument that drug development and marketing entail the construction of new publics, this article shows how strategic drug marketing silences can also constitute new populations of users. It shows how Viagra marketing’s silence about gay users, which facilitated legitimization of the drug as an aid for companionate heterosexuality, created a cultural space for the development of health discourse about gay men as illegitimate, recreational and risky Viagra users. Using Susan Leigh Star’s concepts of ‘simplification’ and ‘complexification’, this article traces the construction and deployment of this public health fact, as well as its subsequent contestation. Using an arena analysis approach, this article demonstrates how marketing discourse and public health fact-making came together in the case of gay Viagra use to refresh long-standing and politically harmful American cultural associations between gay sex and sickness. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Women’s perspectives on breast screening (mammography and breast awareness) were explored in interviews with midlife women sampled for diversity of background and health experience. Attending mammography screening was considered a social obligation despite women’s fears and experiences of discomfort. Women gave considerable legitimacy to mammography visualizations of the breast, and the expert interpretation of these. In comparison, women lacked confidence in breast awareness practices, directly comparing their sensory capabilities with those of the mammogram, although mammography screening did not substitute breast awareness in a straightforward way. The authors argue that reliance on visualizing technology may create a fragmented sense of the body, separating the at risk breast from embodied experience. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines how choice is constructed in relation to risk in a UK ante-natal class. Discursive psychology was applied to transcripts of 50 hours of audio recordings collected from local UK National Childbirth Trust classes. We found that consent to medical control of the birth environment is positively encouraged through Class Leaders’ persuasive advice-giving and the delivery of cautionary (moral) tales in the form of extreme horror stories. Whilst parental agency is embedded in a ‘rhetoric of choice’, regulatory mechanisms of ‘coercive choice’ operate in tandem through a rhetoric of risk that positions medical intervention as the safer option. The right to choose seems to take on the status of a ‘required element’, which is both observed and resisted in discourse but, as previous research has suggested, may not necessarily be sustainable in practice. Our analysis suggests that the normativity of medical interventions in labour and childbirth is discursively reproduced in ante-natal classes whilst parental choice is limited by a powerful ‘rhetoric of risk’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the concept of feminist psychology, hormones and medicalization of depression. Feminist psychologist, Jane Ussher argues that reproductive hormones are responsible for causing higher rates of depression in women. Depression is more prevalent during puberty, menstruation, early motherhood and menopause. It states that the hormonal discourse lubricates a privatization of distress that undermines the ability to read and speak about social injustices.

Differing accounts are conventionally given of the origins of medical sociology and its parent discipline of sociology. These distinct 'histories' are justified on the basis that the sociological founders were uninterested in medicine, mortality and disease. This article challenges these 'constructions' of the past, proposing the theorization of health not as a 'late development of sociology' but an integral part of its formation. Drawing on a selection of key sociological texts, it is argued that evidence of the founders' sustained interest in the infirmities of the individual, of mortality, and in medicine, have been expunged from the historical record through processes of 'canonization' and 'medicalization'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Epidemiological research consistently reports that women experience higher rates of depression than men. Competing biomedical, psychological and sociocultural models adopt a realist epistemology and a discourse of medical naturalism to position depression as a naturally occurring pathology within the woman, caused by biology, cognitions or life stress. Feminist critics argue that this medicalizes women's misery, legitimizes expert intervention, and negates the political, economic and discursive aspects of experience. However, the alternative model of social constructionism may appear to dismiss the 'real' of women's distress, and deny its material and intrapsychic concomitants, as well as negate relevant research findings. A critical review of sociocultural and psychological research on women's depression is conducted. It is argued that a critical-realist epistemology allows us to acknowledge the material-discursive-intrapsychic concomitants of experiences constructed as depression, without privileging one level of analysis above the other, in order to understand women's higher rates of reported depression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite continuing investigations of the efficacy of Canadian addiction treatment services and supports across a range of health care settings and socio-cultural groups, many systemic, geographic and ideological barriers to service provision for women still exist. Determining how current services and supports can become more congruent with women's gender specific needs is a current research focus. Drawing on Butler's reformulation of Althusser's interpellation, this article explores the power of hailing, where hailing power lies, and how hailing operates in discourses about addiction that appear in women's talk of their encounters with addiction services and supports. The article briefly outlines Butler's understanding of interpellation and examines ways by which gender operates as both condition and effect in women becoming addicts. I argue that women's narratives reveal patterns of interaction that intersect and generate complex social meanings and identities, and serve to get women's attention in terms of seeing themselves as addicts. Further, I argue that powerful competing discourses concerning gender and the medicalization of addiction, hailed through these interactions, are taken up as lived realities by some women and resisted by others. Knowing how women are hailed to take up as their own, or resist, aspects of traditional and gendered discourses within addiction treatment and recovery communities can inform gender-compassionate service provision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports qualitative data on how the Swedish Public Employment Service classifies unemployed individuals as 'occupationally disabled' in order to transfer them to various labour market programmes. The article draws on a framework of medicalization, arguing that the individualization of the social issue of unemployment into a personal trouble of disability is a neglected yet important phenomenon that has interesting implications for theory and policy. By classifying some people as disabled in order to explain their unemployment, medicalization can be seen as an important yet so far neglected mechanism in understanding how this individualizing enterprise comes about. It is concluded that by medicalizing unemployment, the target for society's intervention to fight the spectre of unemployment is primarily individuals' personal troubles rather than any social issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of International Social Work is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. 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.)

Female genital cosmetic surgery (FGCS) refers to new treatment/enhancement technologies that have engendered much controversy. Examining FGCS through the lenses of bioethics, feminist theory and medical marketing situates it within makeover culture and deregulatory politics, and links it to feminist debates about making choices within constrained contexts. This article points out numerous analogies between the creation of FGCS and the new sexuality pharmaceuticals, and shows the relevance of the New View Campaign's analysis for this new domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is increasingly taken for granted that 'successful heterosexuality' is contingent upon having a 'normal' and 'healthy' sex life. The recent popularity of the diagnostic label 'Female Sexual Dysfunction' (FSD) is evidence that this social climate has fostered the (re)medicalization of women's sexual problems. In response to feminist concern over the growing use of the FSD label, this article considers data gathered as part of a qualitative, empirical study, examining women's perceptions of sexual difficulties and their treatment. It is argued that women with perceived sexual problems, regardless of whether or not they have been diagnosed with FSD, tend to engage in relationship based 'sex work': the rationalization, improvement, and mastery of sex in their personal lives. Their decisions to take part in or resist sex work are closely connected to the discursive and material production of heterosexuality, gender inequalities and power differences amongst women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the debates concerning the issues related to masculinity and male identity in Japan. It explores the significance of the immediate legalization of Viagra in relation to men's inability to reproduce and to support national interests. It describes the archetypical ideal maleness, encompassed in the well-known image of the salaryman and its implications.

Drawing on autopoiesis theory, Ward (1999) challenges the established view that the adoption of the English infanticide law in 1922 (amended 1938) is an example of the medicalization of law, insisting that the 1922 Act embodied a lay biological theory and that contemporary psychiatric theories of the 'insanities of reproduction' focused on socio-economic, rather than biological, stressors. Both the medicalization and autopoiesis interpretations of infanticide law are misplaced. A broader review of the medical literature discussed by Ward, and of a related anthropological literature he does not treat, reveals a more complex picture: while Ward's critique of the medicalization thesis is broadly apposite, and an associated anthropological literature was also more socio-economic than bio-racist (Reekie, 1998), there was a bio-medical strand of thought, as well as an equally biological atavistic line of theory regarding infanticide, which ran alongside the socio-economic model. In addition, the expressed biologism of infanticide law, whatever its origins, can still be thought of as contributing to the medicalization of law subsequent to its passage and amendment, especially given the dominance of the bio-medical model in psychiatry since the 1960s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One point of debate in discussions of the modernization of developing societies concerns the effects of Westernization on how people in these societies see the world and develop a sense of meaning in light of rapid and often broad-sweeping social and cultural changes. Where Western culture has little influence, traditional and religious based ideologies that define "why people misbehave" dominate modes of thinking, and medicalized definitions of deviant behavior are absent (Conrad 1992). This study of 276 Nepali teachers investigates if definitions of deviant behavior may be influenced by encroaching Westernization. Subjects were presented with a scenario of a 12-year-old girl engaging in deviant behavior Results indicate that those who were in agreement with certain Western values and cultural tastes were more likely to label the girl's behavior as a mental illness and to refer her to a Western-style social agent for treatment rather than to a traditional Nepali helper These findings lend tentative support to the notion that medicalization is a function of Western culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conrad notes that non-medical personnel often accomplish the routine, everyday work of medicalization. This is particularly so in the case of Attention Deficit (Hyperactivity) Disorder, where teachers, special educators and school psychologists identify, assess and administer medication to 'problematic' children. Drawing on data from interviews with Canadian and British mothers of ADD/ADHD children, this article explores mothers' perceptions of educators' roles in medicalizing children who are different, comparing medicalization in two divergent sites. In Canada, where ADD/ADHD is a highly medicalized phenomenon, and teachers have few alternative forms of social control available to them in classrooms, it appears that educators are prepared to identify problem children and press for medical treatment with remarkable vigor. In Britain, where medicalization remains incomplete, and where teachers and special educators have more stringent alternative forms of social control available to them, educators were often described as gatekeepers who will refuse the label or to administer medication. KEYWORDS Attention Deficit (Hyperactivity) Disorder; disabilities; education; medicalization; special needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]