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Accepted Paper:

Ethnographying medicalization  
Baptiste Brossard (Australian National University)

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on various ethnographic and sociological works dealing with self-injury, dementia and sex addiction, the present paper proposes a critique and a reshaping of the concept of medicalization.

Paper long abstract:

The concept of medicalization has been useful in the toolbox of sociologists and anthropologists of mental health, especially as it effectively de-naturalizes the categories people experience as describing their problems, in tying these categories to their historical conditions of production.

However, now that many works have critically addressed the historically situated construction of manifold medical categories, the concept of medicalization requires to be questioned and refined. First, the initial formulation of this concept does not encompass the practical activities through which something is medicalized. Second, it does not allow understanding how labels change what people "are." Third, processes of medicalization, as depicted in the literature, set aside several crucial dimensions of social life, such as the social conditions under which a given category "works" or not, the actual configuration of stakeholders involved in the diffusion of a category, and what people do with the "existential residue," that is, what remains not-labelled by the medicalization process. To tackle these issues, drawing on various ethnographic and sociological works dealing with self-injury, dementia and sex addiction, the present paper aims at proposing a reshaping of the concept of medicalization.

Panel P22
Valuing the anthropology of mental health in Australia
  Session 1 Tuesday 3 December, 2019, -