Medicalisation of Human Emotions: A Cultural Model
Post Contents
Understanding Medicalisation & Pathologisation
Medicalisation is the process of taking aspects of human behaviour and trying to explain it through medical principles.
This process of medicalisation is then used to legitimise the management of our behaviours using conventional medical approaches such as drug interventions or surgical procedures.
The problem with this process is that a great many of our behaviours are the result of things that happen to us during the courses of our lives.
Anxiety, for example, is what we feel as a result of our body's preparation for escaping from a situation we perceive as being threatening to us.
This 'anxiety' mechanism is fundamentally designed to help us react to danger through flight or, if necessary, fight.
So, if we encounter a threat (such as a tiger) whilst out walking in the jungle, we are going to feel anxious - this is a normal and desirable safety reaction.
It seems strange then that this normal reaction would now be classified as a mental illness (anxiety disorder) if the threat was not as obvious as a tiger - for example feeling anxious about making a public presentation (that some people perceive as a 'threat').
You can learn more about our anxiety therapy approach here.
The Medicalisation of Stress
These days stress is talked about as if it is some sort of ‘illness’, that people are suffering ‘from stress’ or have the ‘symptoms of stress’.
This is rather odd because stress is a reaction, an outcome of something NOT a condition in itself.
You cannot suffer from stress, but you can, of course ‘be’ stressed.
You can experience problems as a result of ‘being stressed’ but stress is not, itself, an actual problem.
Sneezing is the outcome of an irritation in the nasal passage.
However, you do not ‘have’ sneezing or ‘suffer from sneezing’ in the same way that you cannot ‘have’ stress or ‘suffer from stress’.
You may BE sneezing, and you may BE stressed.
This is, unfortunately, yet another example of the medicalisation and pathologisation of a normal human response re-modelled as an illness which facilitates the use of pharmacological remedies which may turn out to be more harmful that the problem ever was!
Are Mental Health Problems Biological or Psychological?
Mental health problems have been modelled in two very different ways over the last 50 years or so.
On the one hand, there is the bio-medical model which claims that mental problems are the direct result of neuro-biological faults which are 'corrected' through the use of pharmacological drugs
On the other hand, is the psychological model which argues that most mental health problems are the results of what has happened during a person's life, how they made sense of those experiences and the behaviours they have adopted in order to cope with similar experiences in the present day.
These two models of mental health see both the causes and the solutions to emotional problems in completely different ways.
Here at Tranceform, we adopt the psychological model of mental health problems to help clients and recommend the use of CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy) as one of the most effective psychotherapy aproaches.
More About Medicalisation at the British Psychological Society
Read ‘The medical model has presided over four decades of flat-lining outcomes’ on the BPS website here.
Psychosocial Determinants of Mental Health and Wellness
Psychosocial determinants are those factors which take into consideration the interactions between SOCIAL and individual PSYCHOLOGY.
We are all governed by psychological processes such as thoughts, feelings and meanings and all of us live in a social context of one sort or another.
Models of Mental Health: Differing Perspectives
The main models of mental health highlight the interplay of biological, psychological, and social factors in determining an individual’s mental well-being.
The Biopsychosocial Model recognises the influence of genetics, psychological traits and socioenvironmental factors on mental health.
Post-Traumatic Growth: The Positive Effects of Trauma
Post Traumatic Growth is closely linked to to the idea of resilience and describes the positive effects that experiencing trauma can have on a person.
There is an underlying assumption that experiencing any kind of traumatic event must somehow result in either negative outcomes or, for some, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).