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Medicalization

Medicalization is the process of applying medical interventions to treat, diagnose and have behaviours managed by medical professionals. Medicalization reflects what broader societal changes have been brought to understanding human experiences and what is considered disordered. In other words, the concept shifts viewing mental illness as social or personal problems to medical conditions.

A driving force of this point of view is economics, more specifically, the pharmaceutical industry and its companies benefiting from creating markets for new treatments. Another driving force is a sociocultural factor; the increasing tendency to interpret personal suffering through medical terminology. For example, a contentious topic surrounding the understanding to mental illness is telling people to imagine them as physiological diseases of the brain (a physical organ).

Critical perspectives are surrounded around the idea of mental health diagnoses being more influenced by cultural norms than based on a pure science. For example, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, used to categorize mental disorders based on (constantly revised) lists of symptoms, is itself a cultural document reflecting specific ways of thinking. So, medicalization can be seen as a mechanism of social control.

Ramifications can be seen in people’s self-perceptions and in social relationships. Diagnoses fundamentally change how individuals understand themselves, and sometimes treat themselves. Medical labels also impact personal relationships and interactions in similar ways This includes any outside individuals involved in treatments for that medical label as clinicians have perspectives of their own based on their culture and experiences.

DSM

As previously introduced, the DSM is revised every 10-15 years through a committee process that has been characterized before by disagreement and lack of participation. The decisions surrounding what are classified as diagnoses are made by a group consensus, which can introduce significant subjectivity into the process. Defining clinical significance is problematic. For example, determining how much anxiety or distress is “too much” remains complex. Comorbidity is a ragingly common theme seen in the DSM as well. Symptoms that overlap across different disorders can reduce diagnostic reliability.

Mental illness definitions, thresholds, and boundaries are not static but rather change with societal values. Adding to how sociocultural factors play into this diagnostic process, cultural context significantly shapes how mental disorders are understood and considered before diagnosing. The DSM risks creating an ethnic dividing line in psychiatry by making sociocultural context relevant only for some patients (Bredstrom, 2019). For example, one part of the DSM includes a “cultural syndromes” that was put in the appendix. The argument is, why exoticize other cultures by labelling their mental health issues as cultural at all (Savelli, 2025)?

Critics of Psychiatry