Sick Normalities? Shifting Discussions of Pathology from the Individual to the Societal Level, Seminar at KCL on 18th Sept

CICSI is presenting as part of the ESRC Centre for Society and Mental Health Seminar Series

Abstract:

Ever since the paradigm shift in psychiatry inaugurated with DSM-III in 1980, distress has been increasingly medicalised, accompanied by a prescription epidemic. We have reached a point where it has become the statistical norm in Western countries for people to be diagnosed with at least one “mental disorder” in their lifetime, and where one in four adults are on psychiatric medication.

This talk is part of the wider critical work that seeks to (re-)emphasise the social contexts and causes of distress, and the need to respond to it beyond medicalising. The original contribution is to use the idea of social pathology as a conceptual tool to disclose how normalisation and medicalisation of mental distress obscure social context, thus perpetuating existing social structures.

This contribution goes beyond the important work that focuses on the social determinants of health and well-being in that it shines the light on the nature of society that produces such social determinants. Instead of locating the pathology at the level of individuals, it locates it at the level of societies: Who or what is really ill here? Why and how does the normal functioning of societies require the hegemonic circulation of dispositions, affects, and conduct that their own medical establishment identifies as pathological structures and individuals experience as distress?

Register for the talk.