We can say that the reason for medicalization is “overdiagnosis” because for something to be a disease it must first be defined. For example, situations such as grief, sadness, shyness, failure, and inability to focus have now turned into pathologies with names such as ADHD (attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder), depression, due to medicalization. Medicalization first began to emerge in Illich’s perspective in the 1960s. In this respect, we can say that they go hand in hand with capitalism. In fact, medicalization plays into the hands of capitalism because the medicalization of everything can lead people to consume more of the healthcare industry.
In short, all these can harm individuals’ ability to cope with problems, according to sociologist Ivan Illich. So what does Illich actually mean when he says that medicine harms human coping skills?
Medicalization can make people dependent on the medical field about their health.
Medicalization can destabilize the relationship between patient and doctor. For example, individuals can easily waive their right to have a say on their own health. In this case, people can become overly dependent on medicine’s judgment on their own health. At this point, Illich says that the definition of many conditions that are considered ordinary in life as diseases makes people addicted to medicine. According to Illich, this addiction causes people to forget their daily life skills. We can make this dependence understandable with examples as follows; Menopause is a natural phenomenon unique to women, but after medicine defined menopause as a problem and included it in its field, women began to resort to medicine for menopause, use medical drugs, and manage the menopause process under the supervision of medicine.
Another sociologist Szasz mentions that medicalization first appeared in the field of psychiatry in the 1970s. As we said at the beginning, moods and behaviors that were considered normal before were abnormalized with the diagnosis of psychiatry and started to be named with names such as depression and hyperactivity. Thus, individuals suffering from this condition had to use psychiatric drugs and go to doctor’s checks on certain days every week, as their existence entered the field of medicine, perhaps because they had a sad, sad and melancholic temperament. The inclusion of everything in so many fields of medicine can damage the natural coping abilities of individuals and cause them to always be in need of someone else’s care.
According to Illich; Medicine reduces people’s strategies for suffering by interfering with social life.
Illich talks about the fact that survival is an art for cultures that have not undergone medicalization. If you ask what he means by this situation, we can say that he emphasizes that suffering has not yet disappeared for these cultures.
For example, Illich makes the first example of the medicalization of health on the medicalization of birth. While birth was a normal state until the 19th century, birth was no longer a normal process in the 19th century and beyond. Previously, women started to go to gynecological examinations while helping each other during the birth process. In fact, all women used to give birth normally, but nowadays it can be seen that they resort to cesarean section to make the birth more painless and easier. This is where the critique of medicalization comes into play, because with a method like cesarean section, a normal process for women becomes medical. In other words, as we can see through this example, Illich mentions that patients become completely dependent on medicine and, over time, move away from many of the features that were once considered normal.
Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4
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