The issue that we are going to address is not easy from any angle in which we find ourselves, but let me state my position on this issue. Prescribing a drug is not the problem, but rather that it be prescribed indiscriminately, and that it be the first and only therapeutic choice. His abusive influence is found in childhood, adolescence, adulthood and old age. This accounts for the shift from the idea of disease to that of discomfort, which proposes the use of medication no longer for the purpose of healing, but for well-being.
If something that is not is defined as a disease, then a vast market of remedies and treatments opens up that promise the “solution”. While medicating is a medical act, medicalization alludes to the intersection of theoretical, political, social and economic-commercial factors that intervene in the production, distribution and sale of the large medical and pharmacological technology industries, for what? To give a supposed legality to his livelihood and his praxis. Let us emphasize that the tendency towards medicalization is greater in the field of Mental Health.
As M. Foucault puts it, in the class of March 17, 1976, in defend societymedicalization is a strategy of political power, which uses the technical knowledge of medicine to intervene on bodies and the population, in order to mobilize forces, extract them and make them obey the requirements created by the imperatives of the time.
The imperative of our time in the West is “there is no discomfort”, “do not think” and “be happy”, in a kind of surprising mental weakness that makes a passion for ignorance a virtue. Contemporary imperatives that, on the one hand, imply not wanting to know, and on the other, appeal to the will and redeem the subject from questioning himself about his own position. There are no causes, there is a trend or exported symptoms where an attempt is made to de-responsible the subject for his saying and his actions through the genetic, organic or contextual. This arises from the need of the master of the day to de-responsibility himself. So these practices and these clinics have this same aesthetic, believing that psychopharmaceuticals can resolve discomfort, tempting the subject to not know how to deal with his suffering.
But this logic necessarily leads to dehumanization. The acts have no consequences if a false limit is built in the psychoactive drug.
Before advancing on the factors of medicalization, I am interested in remarking the naturalization of this procedure in the daily life of people. The intake of remedies has become naturalized to such an extent that it has now become a way of life. Anxiolytics, pain relievers, opiates, laxatives, antacids, multivitamins and Viagras of all colors are not only sold in pharmacies but also on the Internet and in supermarkets. It is estimated that 20% of medicines are offered outside the legal marketing circuits. In the United States, it has become the third leading cause of death after cardiovascular diseases and cancer. Denaturing this practice is necessary to be able to understand and progress towards a clinic sustained in ethics.
Let us now move along the economic-commercial axis. We are currently witnessing a probable paradigm shift in the logic of the market. Previously it was held that the market regulated itself, a conception that has failed and that shows that a praxis without regulation destroys itself.
I do not intend to neglect the beneficial role played by research and development promoted by the medical-pharmaceutical industries, which has given rise to multiple effective treatments that improve people’s lives. An example of this is the discovery of psychotropic drugs from the 1950s, which has produced a revolution in the treatment of psychoses. From the field of psychoanalysis, not only do we not oppose the correct prescription of medications, but even in certain acute cases, particularly in the treatment of psychoses, these allow us to establish the necessary conditions to be able to carry out an approach via words.
But it is necessary to reflect on its role in the unnecessary medicalization of life.
Private laboratories are governed by the logic of the market, for them health is not a right, but a business. We need to situate the different pressures of the laboratories to medicate and what to medicate.
The Medical Propaganda Agent (Medical Visitor) is far from being a promoter of the benefits of the product that he offers and disseminates, being a coercion of the doctor by force of economic favors. If at this moment we take any product from any laboratory, and calculate the cost and the profits, they would be around, depending on the product, between 500 and 5000%. I invite you to do it and you will see how conservative I have been.
And it is us and the state who have to regulate these commercial logics. A power of this type is not compatible with the common good or democracy. It is to be hoped that said industry will spare no efforts to expand markets. At the limit, this path leads to a situation in which a disease can be created for each new diagnosis or treatment, regardless of the beneficial nature that they provide.
After laboratories and health professionals, networks and the mass media are the main source of psychic infection, information on health and propaganda about new diseases.
Regarding the theoretical and ideological axis, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM IV) appears first. The first version (DSM-I), like the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), arose from the desire to make a universal classification within the field of Mental Health, that is, one for all.
So this universal of for all that supports this type of globalizing manual, ends in the disappearance of specialized knowledge, in the false “scientific” universalization and in the effective disqualification of the other praxis of mental health. The man of DSM IV is a man to whom all subjectivity is denied.
We consider this type of classification as a coercion to adapt to a system that, due to its structure, excludes the subject.
This contemporary clinic with its diagnosis and articulated to medications, allows the subject to free himself from all causal explanation, from all meaning, and from affirming an illusion of being all-powerful. However, therapeutic failure is explained by an error, either in the precision of the classification or in the choice of medication.
The best example of what has been previously developed is the proliferation of homicidal passages from children or adolescents in the United States that disturbs the North American public opinion and led the congregation of all kinds of knowledge to try to understand what the current psychiatric and psychological clinic cannot clear.
Conclusion
If something that is not such is defined as a disease, an immense market of remedies and treatments inexorably opens up that promise magical and immediate solutions.
People who we can consider healthy are being labeled as sick and are being subjected to treatments that carry unquestionable adverse effects, both due to the very process of labeling them as “abnormal”, and due to the possible effects of therapies, which are never absolutely innocuous. .
In the field of Mental Health, medicalization is promoted from the hegemony that psychiatry and biological psychology have acquired. Faced with the development of neuroscience, psychiatry has set aside the psychogenesis model to resolve conflict in favor of a classification of behaviors that reduces treatment to suppression of the symptoms. The disease is a fault that must be suppressed and not a problem to understand where an etiology must be accounted for. This demonstrates, as we said, the displacement of the idea of disease to that of discomfort, which proposes the use of medicine not for the purpose of healing, but rather for a supposed well-being.
The greed of the DSM V construct is a radical subversion of the symptom in the name of a new “knowledge” that tries to make a disappearance of the classical psychiatric clinic and the contributions of psychoanalysis.
For these reasons, the DSM is a manual created to justify a praxis, a normative morality, a drug intervention, a medicalization of daily life, in summary: an unethical clinic.
There is no health possible with a commercialized and unethical clinic.
Psychoanalyst. Bachelor of Science in Psychology (UBA). Specialist in Clinical Psychology. Former president and founding member of the Argentine Mental Health Association (AASM).
Source: Ambito
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