Considerações sobre a medicalização: uma perspectiva cultural contemporânea

Abstract

This paper intends to establish a theoretical discussion about the medicalization process from the analysis of this process in the contemporaneity. Currently, among the issues that present both medical and psychological clinic, medicalization plays a significant role. Medicalisation is a cultural phenomenon of progressive expansion of the field of intervention of biomedicine through the redefinition of human experiences and behaviors as if they were medical problems (Tesser, 2006). Psychiatry and psychiatric discourse are worthy of mention, since the proliferation of diagnoses increasingly affects individuals as manifestations of disorder in brain biochemistry, mobilizing the often abusive prescription and consumption of psychotropic drugs. We observe that the spread of the medicalization process favors that events of the life are also registered under the heading of mental disorders. In order to carry out this study, particularities of the contemporary society and their articulation with the diffusion of the psychiatric discourse were discussed.