As often seems to happen when a concept is being mulled over, it starts to pop up everywhere. At work, I’ve been reading about two subjects- radical pedagogy, and issues of class (which is yet another case where two separate seemingly subjects ended up merging because issues of class come up in radical pedagogy. In that case the connection is a bit more unsurprising because Jen Gilbert got me on both subjects). And, lo and behold, what should appear but the term ‘pathologizing’.
Pathologizing is interesting because it plays into some interesting practices and philosophies of the medical profession. The first one is what counts as a ‘disease’ or ‘disorder’ in the medical profession. The first thing to realize, on this front, is that subjective experiences have a very specific role in the medical profession. Subjective experiences are things like “feeling pain” or “feeling tired” or “feeling nausea”. Doctors like to ask you about these subjective experiences because the subjective experiences can help them figure out what objective tests to run on you. If their objective tests reveal something problematic, then you have a physical ailment. If they don’t, then you have a psychological ailment. Simple.
In an interesting twist, generally speaking doctors seem to
view psychological ailments as ‘less real’, to the point that, rather than
refer people with psychological ailments to the appropriate doctors (i.e.
psychologists), they tell them that “there’s nothing wrong with them”. A
good example of this is this
discussion by a doctor, who starts out by refering to a particular
syndrome as not existing- they state that the syndrom “as it is currently
construed DOES NOT EXIST!”- and then farther down switches to saying about
the syndrom that it “is a psychiatric illness! This is not to say it is
not real. On the contrary…. It is as real as depression, schizophrenia,
bipolar, PTSD, somatization disorder, etc. And these are very, very real
diseases.” Probably part of the doctor dilemma is that a lot of other
people also think that psychological illnesses aren’t real, so then they are
affronted if a doctor tries to send them off to a psychologist.
What does this have to do with pathologizing? I’m getting there…
posted at 10:28 on Thu, 01 Feb, 2007 |
path: /living
All material copyrighted by Jen Schellinck. All rights reserved.