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Short abstract:

This paper examines how psychological expertise on sleep is constructed in the coverage of sleep in the Uruguayan media over the last 20 years. Drawing on articles from newspapers, weeklies and television programmes, it explores the contemporary process of the psychologization of sleep.

Long abstract:

Sleep has occupied psychology since its beginnings as a discipline. But over the years psychology's interest in sleep has been contested by the sleep sciences, more closely linked to the biomedical approach. Since the mid-20th century, these sleep sciences have established themselves as the main sources of knowledge about sleep and the main providers of treatments for sleep problems and disorders. In fact, much of the knowledge about sleep that circulates today at the popular level results in a medicalised and healthitized vision of sleep that is directly linked to biomedicine and particularly to sleep medicine, a relatively recent sub-speciality. However, psychology has still managed to maintain some of its prerogatives over the field of sleep, and psychologists continue to be called upon as experts when it comes to presenting a scientific vision of sleep to the general public.

This paper examines how psychological expertise on sleep is constructed in the coverage of sleep in the Uruguayan media over the last twenty years. Drawing on articles from newspapers, weeklies and television programmes, it explores the contemporary process of the psychologization of sleep and its relationship to the processes of medicalization and healthitization driven by sleep medicine. It also analyzes how psychology contributes to making sleep a public health problem closely linked to the moralization of people's sleep habits.