Order 1031714: The Medicalization of Society

profiletutorthammy
lessonNine1.ppt
Home>Social Science homework help>Sociology homework help>Order 1031714: The Medicalization of Society

Medicalization and Social Control

Social Control

  • Tend to view medicine as humanistic.
  • Yet discourses around health, sickness and medicine have a regulating affect on individual and collective behavior.
  • The institution of medicine and ideas & norms around health, thus can be view as mechanisms of social control

*

One aspect of medicalization that might not be immediately evident - is the connection between it and social control. We tend to think of medicine as benign - or at least we tend to view it as humanistic; that is, medicine, and the discourses which circulate in our society which constitute medicine, is there to help us.

Tend to view social control as having something to do with the criminal justice system or any system of force and punishment - such as the military, or even within the education system where we’re disciplined - partly through punishments - to behave in particular ways.

Social Control

  • The informal and formal mechanisms which socially regulate individual and society’s behavior.
  • While our behavior feels freely chosen, it is constrained and enabled by external social regulations.
  • Social controls lead to conformity and compliance in society.
  • Social control can be either informal and/or formal

*

Social control, however, is a broader, more encompassing concept and relates to social mechanisms which regulate our behavior.

Informal Mechanisms

Social Norms

Socio-cultural beliefs and ideals give rise to social norms.

Socialized into societal values.

Internalization of norms and values exerts profound affect on our thoughts and behaviors.

This is a largely unconscious process.

Norms are not natural but are rather the product of social and discursive practices.

Examples of socialization?

*

Social control operates most effaciously through informal controls. Informal controls operate through a society’s norms and values… They guide behavior and model how things ‘should be’. If we think about gender - informally regulated through images and ideas. We are not forced to do these things in the usual sense of the word ‘force’, rather we are encouraged to abide by them…

Social Norms and Health

  • Specific values and beliefs circulate around ‘health’ and sickness.
  • Biomedicine is normative and reflects broader ideological beliefs specific to Western society.
  • Health norms are internalized giving rise to a conception of sickness which is culturally specific.

*

Power in society means being able to shape and mold social norms….

It means we have beliefs about health - who and what constitutes health - but also we have defined ways of intervening in health problems.

Sickness and Society

  • Sickness contravenes the social norm of wellness.
  • Like criminal or deviant acts, sickness breaches societal values and thus illness and disease are threats to the social order.
  • Not a benign process: raises moral questions about who is responsible for illness, etc.
  • Norms of ‘health’ embody broader societal values, giving rise to different meanings.

*

We don’t often think about the relationship between medicine and social control. Today we’re going to be thinking about how medicine is part of broader societal patterns of social control.

Having the authority to pathologize behavior and body types is a form of social power…

Health is not an objective phenomenon, it is a socially created idea… and it generlly embodies society’s broader values. What it means to be healthy changes from culture to culture, from society to society, and, within societies, histrocial shufts transform what we view as health and sickness.

Health norms embody societal norms?

In your mind’s eye imagine someone is healthy and someone who is sick….

Embodying Health

*

Beauty and health are closely related, Ideals of beauty translate into ideals of health. In the 19th century the frail and delicate woman was the middle class ideal. Robust women were viewed as unrefined, and here in the States being fat and pasty was a sign of upper social class… Today the ideals have changed significantly. Overly thin women and muscular men.. Once again tying in health with beauty.

Health Today

  • Picture health… describe what’s in your mind’s eye when you think of a healthy person?
  • Describe an ‘unhealthy’ person…
  • How does body weight impact your commonsense conceptions of health and wellness?
  • How do we informally sanction those those who contravene social ideals around health?

*

There are moral connotations… As well as unhealthy, we imagine people to be irresponsible, out of control, lazy, and worse.

Health, Norms, Power

  • Since sickness contravenes norms, there are social reactions.
  • In the process of reacting to sickness we reaffirm a society’s values, maintaining social solidarity.
  • Sickness and deviance are functional for society.
  • The power in society to define norms is socially distributed.
  • Social mechanisms which enforce and regulate norms are also socially distributed.

*

Labeling someone as sick, then, tells us more about the society;s values and cultural norms than it does about the pathology of an individual. Labeling, according to Becker, is a social product…

What are some of the social reactions to sickness?

Formal Control

*

Formal social control is expressed through law as statutes, rules, and regulations against deviant behavior. It is conducted by government and organizations using law enforcement mechanisms and other formal sanctions such as fines and imprisonment.[2] In democratic societies the goals and mechanisms of formal social control are determined through legislation by elected representatives and thus enjoy a measure of support from the population and voluntary compliance.

The medical establishment is an important actor in both officially defining people as deviant and sick. And also they are pivotal in offically intervening.. This intervention, as we shall see, is crucial as it is both is a mechanism which labels an individual and it also serve to symbolically make people outsiders who are in need of some sort of reform.

Making Sickness/Deviance

  • Historically, religious and legal institutions have been responsible for defining deviance.
  • Medical institutions increasingly involved in defining what is normal/abnormal.
  • Badness becomes sickness.
  • 1954 precedent: Durham v. The United States court ruled that “an accused is not criminally responsible if his unlawful act was the product of a mental illness or mental defect”.

*

Middle ages - religious institutions involved in defining deviance: thou shalt not kill. The legal code become ascendary in the 18th and 19th ceturies. In the US, religious pluralism pushed the move..

Increasingly medical institutions are defining behavior as normal or desirable and what is not.

Why Medicine?

  • Increasing medical authority because of larger societal values.
  • Religious discourses viewed as irrational.
  • Legal discourses (judgments, decisions, etc) viewed as too subjective.
  • Medical discourses appear more scientific, rational, and objective.
  • Technology and expertise underlying this value.

*

Religious discourse viewed as irrational… Also religious pluraity means that one religious entitiy does not dominate.

Medical Authority

  • Medical establishment more authority to define behavior and conditions as deviant (sickness) or not.
  • Increasing authority in relation to moral issues such as what is good, what is bad (drugs, alcohol, etc).
  • Increasing nexus of legal and medical institutions.
  • The imposition of medical ‘treatment’ through court orders (e.g. Prenatal endangerment, overriding religious convictions, superseding parental responsibility in childcare).
  • Euthanasia? A medical issue…?

*

Childbirth choices, blood transfusions for Jehovah Witnesses,

Med Authority Cont…

  • Medical ‘diagnoses’ certify deviant categories.
  • Societal acceptance of medical categories legitimates the institution’s response towards those labeled (Diagnosis, treatment, therapy, counseling, etc).

*

Ritalin use: 90% of all the world’s use is in the US)

Examples of Social Control

  • Intersex people: the invasive surgeries used to ‘correct nature’.
  • Difficult to manage children prescribed drugs such as Ritalin.
  • Elderly people prescribed sedatives to help manage them.
  • Psychiatric care to normalize unruly behavior.

Neutral?

  • Zola (1983) argues that definitions of sickness are never neutral.
  • Definitions of sickness always involve a moral evaluation which establishes normality and desirability.
  • Psychiatrists historically have defined many behaviors as ‘sickness’ in need of treatment and intervention.
  • Many diagnoses carry stigma - AIDS, leprosy, TB, etc.
  • The ‘type’ of patient you are (compliant, consenting, etc) also gives rise to labeling.

*

Alcoholism, homosexuality. Hysteria,drug addicitiion, arson, etc.

One reason the disabled movement has been so fierce in its attempt to demedicalize disability (including deafness) is that any sort of labeling of condition makes you outside the norm, it makes you undesirable,….

“.. If anything can be show to affect the workings of the body and to a lesser extent the mind, then it can be labeled an ‘illness’ itself or jurisdictionally a ‘medical problem”. (Zola, 1983).

Even normal and healthy behaviors and events (menstruation, childbirth, body and facial shape, etc) are subject to medicalization and thus carry a set of negative connotations.

Labeling and Social Roles

  • The ‘sick role’ is one controlling mechanism.
  • When we are labeled with illness we take on a social role.
  • With social roles come social expectations

Questions

  • Outline Parson’s concept of the sick role.
  • What expectations do we associate with the sick role?
  • What are the positive consequences of being labeled ‘sick’.
  • What are some of the negative consequences of the sick role?
  • List some of the societal and institutional responses to sickness.
  • How is the sick role a mechanism of social control?