Medicalization, Natural Childbirth and Birthing Experiences

Although much of the early sociological and feminist analysis of medicalization focused on reproductive issues and childbirth, attention has moved away from this topic over time as new conditions have become subject to the medicalization process. At the same time, one of the major concepts within this analytical framework, the dichotomy of 'natural' versus 'medical', has not been sufficiently problematized. In this article, we call for a renewed examination of the medicalization of childbirth from a critical perspective that neither takes for granted the meaning of this dichotomy, nor presupposes feminist perspectives or those of privileged groups of women. We revisit sociological frameworks and feminist critiques of medicalization, specifically around childbirth, and review scholarship that addresses their limitations. We propose a research agenda that goes beyond the traditional assumptions about 'natural' and 'medical' childbirth and examines more closely how medicalization processes both shape and conflict with women's subjective experiences of childbirth.     

Secularization, Differentiation, and the Function of Religious Value Orientations

The term "secularization," when its referent is social institutions and value-norm complexes, is viewed as an instance of differentiation. However, the process of differentiation has both structural and functional components. Confusion in the debate over the nature and extent of secularization in American society arises from the fact that there is disagreement over the functions of religion in a differentiated social setting. A typology of meanings of "secularization" is developed by focusing on this functional component of the differentiation process. This typology, combined with a specification of the various meanings of "religion," is utilized to pinpoint specific areas of disagreement in the debate over secularization. Suggestions are made on ways to empirically resolve the controversy.     

The shifting engines of medicalization

Social scientists and other analysts have written about medicalization since at least the 1970s. Most of these studies depict the medical profession, interprofessional or organizational contests, or social movements and interest groups as the prime movers toward medicalization. This article contends that changes in medicine in the past two decades are altering the medicalization process. Using several case examples, I argue that three major changes in medical knowledge and organization have engendered an important shift in the engines that drive medicalization: biotechnology (especially the pharmaceutical industry and genetics), consumers, and managed care. Doctors are still gatekeepers for medical treatment, but their role has become more subordinate in the expansion or contraction of medicalization. Medicalization is now more driven by commercial and market interests than by professional claims-makers. The definitional center of medicalization remains constant, but the availability of new pharmaceutical and potential genetic treatments are increasingly drivers for new medical categories. This requires a shift in the sociological focus examining medicalization for the twenty-first century.     

Selling slumber: American neoliberalism and the medicalization of sleeplessness

Sleeplessness is an ancient and cross‐cultural phenomenon that is socially structured and restructured against a backdrop of ideology and inequality. In an effort to make sense of sleeplessness, some scholars have invoked the medicalization framework, which highlights consumerism, managed care, biotechnology, and physicians as key “engines” that foster the transformation of this formerly “normal” condition to one that people view as a medical problem. However, this burgeoning literature has not answered the call of medical sociologists to situate the medicalization process in a political economic context. In this article, we employ the case study of sleeplessness and the creation of the “Sleep Industrial Complex” to expand the medicalization framework and illustrate how American neoliberalism creates an ideal environment for the primary engines of medicalization. We identify three critical features of American neoliberalism—enhancement culture, commodification of health, and a “productivity imperative”—that act in concert with the driving engines to foster an environment wherein medicalization not only survives but also thrives.     

Sociology Dismissing Religion? The Presentation of Religious Change in Introductory Sociology Textbooks

This paper explores whether the field of sociology harbors a dismissive attitude towards religion. Specifically it examines whether introductory sociology textbooks present the classic secularization theory over the more recent religious economies explanation of religious change. The classical secularization thesis suggests that religion is declining in importance in modern societies and may disappear completely. The religious economies perspective proposes that religion has actually become more influential and dynamic over time. While both theories are well represented in the sociology of religion literature, we explore whether generalist sociology textbooks reflect this reality. This article provides a content analysis of 31 introductory sociology textbooks published between 2003 and 2006. We assess the presence and promotion of the above theories in these textbooks. Our analysis reveals that 20 (65%) of the 31 textbooks in our study present only secularization theory, while seven (23%) of the textbooks cover both secularization theory and religious economies theory. We assess the ramifications of such a lopsided arrangement and conclude by encouraging a more open dialogue on this issue.     

The medicalization of women's sexual pain

The medicalization of women's sexual problems under the overall rubric of female sexual dysfunction (FSD) has been thoroughly critiqued by feminist scholars, health practitioners, and sex therapists. However, there has been much less commentary on the medicalization of women's sexual pain-currently, a subset of an official FSD diagnosis. This article critically examines interdisciplinary understandings and ways of addressing sexual pain. It analyzes these frameworks in relation to feminist theories on medicalization, heteronormativity, and the reciprocal relationship between these two processes. We argue that many women who experience sexual pain have been eager for medicalization as a path to minimizing pain during sexual activity and reinstating normative heterosexual practices and identities. These goals have been lobbied for by patient advocacy groups and noted by professionals in the field. Although there are some clear benefits to this case for medicalization, there are also theoretical, personal, and political costs. Guided by a growing body of feminist theoretical and qualitative, empirical research on this topic, as well as the first author's personal experience of sexual pain, this article highlights some alternatives to medicalization and makes suggestions for change.     

Attention Deficit‐Hyperactivity Disorder as the Medicalization of Childhood: Challenges from and for Sociology

Sociology has problematized the expanding province of medicine for several decades, and it is important to clarify some of the central questions regarding the medicalization question for those new to this subset of the discipline. With a primary focus on the diagnosis of attention deficit‐hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), this paper seeks to accomplish four goals. First, this paper will summarize the general concept of medicalization, including the way that medical practitioners attribute children’s behavioral problems to disease entities. Second, this paper argues that the medicalization of childhood and the rise of the disease entity of ADHD stems from the transformation of children and childhood into objects of scientific study. Third, using the example of ADHD, this paper will attempt to demystify the premise that medicalization emanates from the “monolith” of medicine, but is instead, a process rife with internal contradiction and epistemological disagreement. Fourth, following the uncertainty of etiological positions toward childhood behavior problems, this paper will discuss some of the external critiques of medicalization, including the way that lay actors push back against the medicalization process, and concerns about the effectiveness of technologies used to diagnose and treat ADHD.     

Disease Mongering in Direct‐to‐Consumer Advertising and the Expansion of the Antidepressant Market

The recent trend toward health care consumerism is largely the product of market practices, which have instilled the notion of health care as a product to be purchased by informed, empowered consumers, rather than a service bestowed upon a patient by a paternalistic provider. In recent years, health care consumerism has been facilitated by direct‐to‐consumer advertising (DTCA) of pharmaceutical products. In this paper, we use the case of DTCA for antidepressant medications to examine medicalization techniques used to promote consumerism and establish and expand the antidepressant market. We used content analysis of DTCA from the 1997–2006 issues of a broad sample of women's, men's, and common readership magazines to identify techniques of medicalization, and we analyzed in‐depth interviews with magazine readers and antidepressant users to examine how such messages are received. Findings are presented within a framework of economic sociology, which allowed us to unveil the links between emotions and social action that undergird responses to medicalization techniques and consumption of advertised products.     

From Sin to Sick: Digital Judaism and Pornography

This article explores how a Jewish religious website dedicated to solving pornography addiction negotiates religion/tradition and science/technological modernity. Further, the article discusses how medicalization of sexuality is used to resolve inherent tensions in the practice of digital usage. Medicalization language transforms the GuardYourEyes.com website from a forbidden medium for ultra-Orthodox members into a clinical space, a tool for healing. Furthermore, medicalization language allows religious digital prosumers to speak freely about sexuality. By framing sexuality as a “problem of truth” (Foucault, 1998), the ultra-Orthodox authors of GuardYourEyes.com can speak about sex, without being guilty of breaking the admonition that forbids speaking about sex. However, this open discussion serves as a tool to discipline and regulate sexual behavior, thus maintaining the accepted community norms, albeit in a way that is revolutionary for this community. Furthermore, by supporting religious language with medical language, religion and science blur in a way that could potentially undermine both.     

The idea of secularization in the works of max weber: A theoretical outline

The last two decades have witnessed a re-discovery of the sociology of religion. Not accidentally, this resurgence roughly coincides with the publication of English translations of Weber's seminal theories and empirical studies of world religions. Many contemporary themes in the sociology of religion still draw heavily from Weber's ideas. Given his contemporary importance to the subject, it is somewhat surprising that no real attempt has been made to extrapolate from Weber's work a systematic theory of one of the most important themes of the sociology of religion: secularization. The author points to the fact that Weber himself rarely used the term “secularization,” though the idea is an important theme in much of his work. In this paper, the idea of secularization is examined in the context of Weber's work, paying special attention to the specific processes he had in mind whenever he referred to it. More generally, while not claiming to be comprehensive, the discussion attempts to fill the gap by presenting the general outlines of a systematic Weberian theory of secularization.     

Patronage and secularization: social obligation and church support

As a contribution to our understanding of secularization in Britain, this paper examines the role of religious patronage. It illustrates nineteenth and early twentieth century support for the churches from rural landowners and major industrial employers, considers its benefits, and explains its rapid disappearance. The paper argues that the end of the expectation that high status individuals and major employers would actively promote organized religion is both significant evidence of secularization and a cause of further decline.     

宗教世俗化与伊斯兰原教旨主义的产生

宗教的世俗化与宗教所处的时代紧密相连，而它的神圣化与世俗化是对化解不开的矛盾。宗教的本质要求宗教神圣化，而其世俗化又不以人的意志为转移，并不可能完全世俗化，当宗教世俗化达到一定程度时，又会要求尊重其神圣性的一面。极端的宗教世俗化必然会导致极端的宗教神圣化，这就是现代伊斯兰原教旨主义产生的内在原因之一。     

A Sociological Alternative to the Psychiatric Conceptualization of Mental Suffering

Uncovering both the structural causes and experiences of suffering is a central sociological endeavor. Sociologists study many different kinds of suffering; after all, strife is experienced both physically and emotionally, because of internal factors such as illness, due to external factors such as trauma, and as a result of economic, political or natural environments. In this paper, I address one form of suffering: mental suffering. In particular, I describe the medicalization of mental suffering in biological psychiatry, which focuses on the genetic factors of illness and equates mental suffering with mental illness. The psychiatric concept of mental illness highlights the continuing, crucial role for sociology in both understanding the experience and identifying the structural roots of suffering. Since the dominant conceptualization of mental suffering is as a medical concept, it is vital for sociology to offer alternative explanations and contribute to a multidimensional analysis. The roots of mental suffering are much more than biological; social comparison, social inequality, and other social stressors are equally important etiological considerations. Therefore, a true understanding of mental suffering requires multiple perspectives, and sociological constructs guard against a total medicalization of mental suffering.     

De-publicized secularization and contemporary Chinese mass culture

This article attempts to distinguish two kinds of secularization and mass culture in contemporary China by creatively deploying Hannah Arendt, Jurgen Habermas and other western thinkers’ theories of secularization and modernity. It argues that, in the 1980s, China underwent a first process of secularization: that was characterized by liberating a secular society from the quasi-religious totalitarianism of the Cultural Revolution through the re-establishment of a civic society, which integrated individualism and publicness, with awareness of individual rights and rights for participation. The participation of new and self-disciplined rational individuals, who were concerned with pubic interests and issues. This essay takes Teresea Teng's popular songs as an important example of this first kind of secularization, as an attempt to demonstrate how the mass culture of the 1980s actively contributed to the construction of this new publicness. Since the 1990s, however, another kind of secularization emerged, one that did not care about the public world and others, but instead about material enjoyment and intimate private matters. Different from the religious path, this represents a way of abandoning the public world: it takes the form of a retreat into bodily/physiological happiness and one's secluded private world, leading to the development of a morbid narcissistic personality. This essay argues that these two kinds of secularization are the foundation and the starting point for us to understand the political effects of two kinds of mass culture.     

Misdiagnosing medicalization: penal psychopathy and psychiatric practice

Theory and Society - This article offers a critique and reconstruction of the concept of medicalization. Most researchers describe medicalization as the redefinition of social problems as medical...     

Medicalization of Social Problems: Rising Depression-related Absenteeism in Japan

Increasing numbers of people are absent from work with a diagnosis of depression, and this has become a social problem in Japan. This study examines the hypothesis that this rise of depression-related absenteeism in Japan is influenced by social factors that contribute to the medicalization of social problems. Here, “social factors” are corporate systems that affect workers' psychology and mental health, media coverage and disease awareness campaigns by pharmaceutical companies, the intentions of patients' physicians, as well as psychopathological factors such as increased workplace stress. Data were obtained from semi-structured interviews conducted with 50 workers who had a history of taking depression-related leaves of absence, and a re-diagnosis by six physicians of 10 representative cases derived from categorizations based on data from the interviews. The data were analyzed to identify social factors underlying the rise in depression-related absenteeism and the mechanisms of medicalization of social problems. Social factors found to affect the rise of depression-related absenteeism include mentalities whereby patients, seeking to escape from harsh work environments, may wish to receive a diagnosis of depression to take a leave of absence; and the intention of participants' physicians to provide the diagnosis out of sympathy even when official diagnostic criteria are not met. Thus, it would seem that work-related social problems that should normally be addressed by public policy measures are in fact being medicalized. Moreover, this study considers how “self-medicalization” by patients renders the solution to social problems more complex by contributing to the further medicalization of social problems.     

From desire to disease: human papillomavirus (HPV) and the medicalization of nascent female sexuality

This article critically examines the proliferation of information on the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination as integral to contemporary processes of medicalization that take the young female body and her nascent sexuality as its primary object and target. We suggest that the recent introduction of voluntary HPV vaccination for girls, in North America and elsewhere, constitutes a form of neomedicalization (Batt & Lippman, 2010 ) that links risks for future disease (cervical cancer) with the transmission of a common, sexually transmitted infection (HPV). Informed by findings from a critical discourse analysis of Canadian English newspapers, magazines, and public information about HPV vaccination, our interest is on how the emergence of sexual relationships becomes constructed as a time fraught with risks to future health, and that must be managed through biotechnological intervention (vaccination). We suggest that this configuration of medicalization, rather than demarcate a new category of abnormality that can be treated with pharmaceutical or medical intervention, positions the emergence of sexuality itself as the basis of risk and pathologization. The article concludes by considering the implications of this form of medicalization for constructions of female sexuality and sexual health education.     

The medicalization of Nonhuman Animal rights: frame contestation and the exploitation of disability

Nonhuman Animal rights activists are sometimes dismissed as ‘crazy’ or irrational by countermovements seeking to protect status quo social structures. Social movements themselves often utilize disability narratives in their claims-making as well. In this article, we argue that Nonhuman Animal exploitation and Nonhuman Animal rights activism are sometimes medicalized in frame disputes. The contestation over mental ability ultimately exploits humans with disabilities. The medicalization of Nonhuman Animal rights activism diminishes activists’ social justice claims, but the movement’s medicalization of Nonhuman Animal use unfairly otherizes its target population and treats disability identity as a pejorative. Utilizing a content analysis of major newspapers and anti-speciesist activist blogs published between 2009 and 2013, it is argued that disability has been incorporated into the tactical repertoires of the Nonhuman Animal rights movement and countermovements, becoming a site of frame contestation. The findings could have implications for a number of other social movements that also negatively utilize disability narratives.