Feeble therapies desperately seeking fickle pathologies

Abstract

Medicine, psychology, and psychiatry are not only modes of scientific knowledge or professional practice, but also means of social control that participate in regulating behavior. The “re-pathologizing” of psychiatry during the past 25 years bears witness to an anthropological mutation that reduces the human being to the sum of his or her conduct. In order to get to this “medico-economic” civilization of the subject, postmodern psychiatry has needed to deconstruct and reconstruct its normative landscape for the benefit of “fickle” notions and “behavioral disorders,” at the expense of the concept of “psychological suffering.”

Keywords:

• Pathologization
• medicalization
• medicoeconomics
• psychiatry
• psychology
• psychological suffering
• behavioral disorder

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Claire Launchbury for the translation.

Notes

1. Pas de 0 de conduite pour les enfants de 3 ans ! [No 0/10 for behaviour for three year old children!] ouvrage collectif, Toulouse : érès.