Essay On Medicalization

Medicalization and the Construction of a Bionic Society
Just four decades ago, audiences were intrigued by the science fiction television series The Bionic Woman; the tale of a woman who is re-built and in a sense reborn after sustaining life-threatening injuries. Jamie Sommers was saved with the help surgical implants and prosthetics that not only repaired her broken body, but enhanced her previous abilities with super-human strength. Today, the term bionic is used to describe a society changed by the social construct of medicalization, a term defined as assigning a medical meaning to a person’s physical characteristics, mental processes, and deviant behaviors (Schierenbeck, 2010). Medicalization, with the assistance of biotechnology, allows
Mental health is one of the most medicalized aspects of human life, encompassing most conditions not physically observable to medical professionals (Parens, 2011, p. 3). Behaviors, emotions, phobias, unexplained fatigue, personality traits, relationship dynamics, and learning disabilities all fit into the mental wellness spectrum. Although many of these conditions can be managed with behavior modification, intervention, and support services offered by mental health professionals, most are treated with medications by general practitioners who fail to identify the root cause of the presenting condition (Maturo, 2012, p. 125). Erik Parens exemplifies this by illustrating a case of a woman who considers herself to be in a loving relationship with her husband, but seeks additional antidepressant therapy to alleviate lingering feelings of sadness and stress, enabling her to better tolerate her husband’s promiscuity (2011, p. 8). Rather than accepting the reality of her relationship and her husband’s deviant behavior, she chooses to modify her own health and chemical balance by altering her feelings of distress with medication; enabling her to fit into the social norm of a happy marriage (Parens,