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Does anyone feel like their scraped knees and head colds are "medicalized" because there's treatment available and medical terminology for talking about it? Yo
by dkarl 7y ago
Does anyone feel like their scraped knees and head colds are "medicalized" because there's treatment available and medical terminology for talking about it? You can take your scraped knee to your family doctor or an urgent care clinic and get a bandage applied to it, but people rarely do, and having the option doesn't freak anyone out.
So why are people bothered by their anxiety or reoccurring blue moods being "medicalized?" As far as I can tell, it's just the stubborn lingering stigma associated with mental illness. The fact that a person's cold is a physical illness feels harmless to them, but the idea that they might be suffering from a "mental" illness, even a mild and common one, feels way more momentous and scary than it should.
Clearly I am not alone in my sense that we have already hit the boundaries of how far we can sensibly apply the paradigm of mental health as a means of understanding and addressing human misfortunes.
This is ridiculous. We certainly haven't gone far enough when people identify "mental health" with an inability to function without professional support. How ridiculous would it be if people denied having a physical injury when they had a scraped knee, because they felt denial was the only way to avoid seeing a doctor? How ridiculous would it be if people didn't brush their teeth because they didn't want to give up their precious self-reliance to "dental health" professionals? We reduce our reliance on professionals by applying knowledge from those professions, not by denying their relevance.