In the world that we live in today, many people would find it difficult to imagine living in a world where medicine and treatment are not readily available. The replacement of religious explanations to medical and scientific explanations has become a means of social control. If a person is in pain, they can easily set up an appointment with a doctor and receive some sort of medical diagnosis. However, there are certain instances where a problem has not been medicalized, or recognized as a medical problem, and their issue will be dismissed completely. The movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest delves into the idea of medicalization and how it can be used for the good, or for the bad, in terms of the “sick role.” Medicalization in the “deviant” world can help people define whether their behavior is an illness; however, it can also cause great amounts of trouble by keeping the person under “control” with treatments, or through labeling the person within a society as “deviant.”
Medicalization is a process in which certain medical problems and troubles are defined and classified as a medical illness. In terms of deviance, medicalization can occur to a sickness that deviates from the assumed social state of health—something that is not classified as normal. However, in order to define an “abnormal” behavior as medical, there needs to be a demand that some form of treatment should exist, and a licenses professional should provide that treatment (Conrad, 1992, p. 210). There is also what Chalfant and Noble refer to as the “the medicalization of deviance,” which implies a shift from a legal perspective to a medical one (1979, p.792). These so-called “deviant” problems can be associated with alcoholism and drug abuse. On the other hand i...
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...—illnesses became medicalized where previous “illnesses” are seen as normal occurrences, becoming de-medicalized in the process (i.e., homosexuality). Society continues to control the medical realm as beliefs and ideas are revamped to fit the culture in that modern-day.
Works Cited
Chalfant, H. Paul, & Noble, Dorinda N. (1979). The transition to medicalized views, alcoholism
and social workers. Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare, 792-804.
Conrad, Peter. (1992). Medicalization and social control. Annual Review of Sociology, 18,
209-232.
Conrad, Peter. (2005). The shifting engines of medicalization. Journal of Health and Social
Behavior, 46(3), 2-14.
Goldstein, Joseph, & Katz, Jay. (1963). Abolish the “insanity defense”—why not?. The Yale
Law Journal, 72, 853-876.
Milos, Forman (Director). (1975). One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest [DVD].
People trust doctors to save lives. Everyday millions of Americans swallow pills prescribed by doctors to alleviate painful symptoms of conditions they may have. Others entrust their lives to doctors, with full trust that the doctors have the patient’s best interests in mind. In cases such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, the Crownsville Hospital of the Negro Insane, and Joseph Mengele’s Research, doctors did not take care of the patients but instead focused on their self-interest. Rebecca Skloot, in her contemporary nonfiction novel The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, uses logos to reveal corruption in the medical field in order to protect individuals in the future.
In sociological terms Medicalization can be defines in various ways. Medicalization is known to be a condition or behavior becomes defined as a medical problem requiring a medical solution (Weitz, 2012, P. 106). Another definition of how Medicalization can be defined is by a non-medical problematic concern and putting it into medical terms, from an illness or a
“ Please understand: We do not impose certain rules and restrictions on you with out a great deal of thought about their therapeutic value. A good many of you are in here because you could not adjust to the rules of society in the Outside World, because you refused to face up to them, because you tried to circumvent them and avoid them. At some time – perhaps in your childhood – you may have been allowed to get away with flouting the rules of society. When you broke a rule you knew it. You wanted to be dealt with, needed it, but the punishment did not come. That foolish lenience on the part of your parents may have been the germ that grew in to your present illness. I tell you this hoping you will understand that it is entirely for your own good that we enforce discipline and order.” (Kesey 188).
In the 1960’s Ken Kesey, a student of the university of Oregon and Stanford University, became interested in alternative medicine and mental health after participating in a US Military psychedelic drug study. Kesey proceed to work for this same institution. For him it was important to take notes on the individuals in this ward, to draw them even! Kesey had an urge to get to know them, even to understand their story and this is precisely what lead him to his current perspective on society and the conformity which it expects of those who are a part of it. It is in this spirit which he wrote one flew over the Cuckoo’s nest and made a brilliant example of counter culture which to this day stands as a strong criticism to the way which mental health professions can become so corrupt and out of control.
Mental health patients were considered innately inferior and treated as the weaker portion of the human race due to the prevailing dominant theory of Social Darwinism in the 1800s. They were put in mental asylums, where conditions had deteriorated substantially from earlier in the century. (Floyd) The public’s interest about the unsatisfactory care of the mentally ill, championed by Dorothea Dix, led to some reforms, such as higher medical standards, more oversight into asylum practices, and more research into mental health. (Floyd) Nevertheless, the status of the mentally ill did not elevate much higher, and by the 1890s the repeated failure of asylum therapy convinced most that insanity and mental illness was incorrigible. Finding no alternatives, however, patients continued to be sent to asylums to attempt to cure them as much as to isolate them from the rest of society. (Roberts) Unfortunately, people also began to fear the proliferation of the mentally ill. When sterilization became considered, unrealistic, more, cheaper asylums were built as a means of segregated them and preventing an increase in their numbers. (Roberts)
Moral treatment is a treatment that uses “psychological methods” to treat mental diseases (Packet Two, 26). In general, moral treatment was a relatively benevolent and humane approach to treat mental disorders. Before the introduction of moral treatment, insane people were regarded by the general public as wild animals whose brains were physically impaired and usually incurable (Packet One, 11). Therefore, regardless of patients’ specific symptoms, physicians generally labeled patients as lunatics and treated them with the same method (Packet One, 11). Because of the perceived impossibility of curing mental illness, physicians put far greater emphasis on restraining patients’ potential danger behaviors than striving to bring them back to sanity. Cruel methods such as bloodletting were widely used, but their effectiveness was really poor. Moral treatment was a response to this ineffective and brutal traditional treatment. The advocates of moral treatment insisted that mental diseases were curable. By providing a friendly environment that contributed to reviving, moral treatment could help patients to...
The human brain is a vast, unexplainable, and unpredictable organ. This is the way that many modern physicians view the mind. Imagine what physicians three hundred years ago understood about the way their patients thought. The treatment of the mentally ill in the eighteenth century was appalling. The understanding of mental illness was very small, but the animalistic treatment of patients was disgusting. William Hogarth depicts Bethlam, the largest mental illness hospital in Britain, in his 1733 painting The Madhouse1. The public’s view of mental illness was very poor and many people underestimated how mentally ill some patients were. The public and the doctors’ view on insanity was changing constantly, making it difficult to treat those who were hospitalized2. “Madhouses” became a dumping ground for people in society that could not be handled by the criminal justice system. People who refused to work, single mothers, and children who refused to follow orders were being sent to mental illness hospitals3. A lack of understanding was the main reason for the ineptness of the health system to deal with the mentally ill, but the treatment of the patients was cruel and inhumane. The British’s handling of mentally ill patients was in disarray.
The sickness is not something that affects the human body but it is the poverty, violence, unaffordable healthcare, housing crises, food scarcity, and health stigma that has become normal in society. By placing a high value on health and healthcare, the patriarchal society we live in has been able to set a value on people. Thus those which are considered inferior to begin with, such as racial minorities, women or queer people, have a bigger disadvantage. The persons worth is then measured in the ability to sell labor, mediated by identity, and defines our access to the basic needs of life, those who are sick are seen as expendable in exchange of the interest of those who are "well". Hedva states, "To stay alive, capitalism cannot be responsible for our care… its logic of exploitation requires that some of us die” (2015).
Peter Conrad’s book, The Medicalization of Society: On the Transformation of Human Conditions into Treatable Disorders, examined several cases of human conditions, once viewed as normal, now considered as medical issues. Conrad defined this transition of human problems to disorders that are medically defined, studied, diagnosed and treated as “medicalization”. Specifically, Conrad discussed certain conditions, such as adult ADHD, as age related phenomena that have been medicalized. Throughout, Conrad demonstrated how these issues became medically defined because of the current research and financing structure of medicine in the United States. Those newly defined illnesses changed people’s perceptions and expectations of health and old age, thus dramatically altering society’s expectations of medicine and subsequent life quality. Conrad’s ethnography is a good example of the ethnomedical approach to medical anthropology that addressed several health conditions that are prominent in the United States. He culminated his book by arguing medicalization primarily serves as a form of social control, solving problems with individuals and not society. While the book clearly explained a wide range of negative causes and effects of medicalization, Conrad only acknowledged a few examples of successful resistance briefly in his last chapter. In order to empower its readers beyond education, the book should have examined these instances of anti-medicalization to find similarities and derive productive countermeasures for individuals to follow. Conrad thoroughly outlined the history, examples and influencing factors that promote medicalization, but failed to offer any combative solution to the resulting problems of medicalization.
... isolation policy provided patients with some social support, but continuously deprived them of their civil liberties. Furthermore, the policy as an authoritative statement on the disease may have fostered the social stigma associated with a belief that the disease is a dreadful contagion, thereby maintaining a hurdle to patients' reintegration into society. Evidently, the policy's abolition was not easily accomplished nor was achieved solely by advances in scientific knowledge”. (P. 10)
1. The main thesis of the article is that deviance means going against the social norms. Social norms are also different for which person. Rosenhan says that pseudo patients are never detected as sane because each staff member has a confirmation bias. The setting of the mental hospital confirms their bias and they read each behavior from every patient and taper the behavior to fit the diagnosis.
Once upon a time, long ago in the mists of time, sprawling brick structures housed countless individuals with mental disturbances. These massive structures were known to the world as mental asylums for the insane. In reality, the majorities of these individuals were not insane, but in contrast were suffering from mild mental problems such as depression or anxiety. These people were looked down upon in society and were labeled as "freaks" or "batty" because of their mental disorder. In the early twentieth century, mental issues were considered taboo. If a family had a sibling or relative who was suffering from a mental disorder, they were swept under a rug; to be taken care of at another time. These days, these immense structures are an object of the past, a bygone era. Many asylums still stand tall as monuments to the world of health care, while many do not stand at all.
Weiss, G. L., & Lonnquist, L. E. (2012). The sociology of health, healing, and illness. Boston:
Such forces may lead to overdiagnosis or an “unintended medicalization of normality” that reduces the validity of the concept of psychopathology (Frances & Widiger, 2012). But physicians and clinicians operate with an understandable bias for making false positive diagnoses over false negatives, which is likely reflected in their definitions of disorder. Nowhere is that clearer than in Rosenhan’s 1973 study on the “sane in insane places.” Professionals are the ones defining psychopathology on a daily basis through diagnosis and treatment, and they are biased by setting (the institutions they work in) and prior diagnoses—once a patient had a label, they were stuck with it. As Rosenhan (1973) concluded, “Psychiatric diagnosis betrays little about the patient but much about the environment in which an observer finds
Medicine as a Form of Social Control This critique will examine the view that medicine is a form of social control. There are many theorists that have different opinions on this view. This critique will discuss each one and their different views. We live in a society where there is a complex division of labour and where enormous varieties of specialist healing roles are recognised.