Medicalization of suffering in therapeutic culture: vulnerability and unachievable normality

• Autor(a) principal: Pombo, Mariana Ferreira
• Data de Publicação: 2017
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: RECIIS (Online)
• Texto Completo: https://www.reciis.icict.fiocruz.br/index.php/reciis/article/view/1235
• topic: medicalization of suffering; contemporaneity; vulnerability; unachievable normality; psychiatry.; medicalization of suffering; contemporaneity; vulnerability; unachievable normality; psychiatry.; medicalização do sofrimento; contemporaneidade; vulnerabilidade; normalidade inalcançável; psiquiatria.

This article bases on the recent increase in the number of people receiving a psychiatric diagnosis and tries to understand how the emergence of a therapeutic culture, in the transition from modernity to contemporaneity, contributed to this increase. Our hypothesis is that the changes in culture tend to make more people think of themselves as ill, since these changes determine modifications in the understanding of subjectivity, in the relations between normal and pathological and in the psychiatric concepts. Following a Foucault’s intuition, we analyse the effects of these changes on knowledge production about the individuals and the influence of the produced speeches on the subjects.