*The Medicalization of Society*
"The Medicalization of Society" is a book by Peter Conrad, publ. 2007. I think that it is very relevant to Aspergers/AS/Autism.
... [ and ] the greatest social control power comes from having the authority to define behaviours, persons, and things.
Accepting the medical model of AS/Autism/Aspergers/PDD/NOS plays into the hands of the medical profession's power to define human behaviour as normal, abnormal, or pathological, and contributes to the establishment of this form of social control.
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I've just been watching a couple of documentaries on this very subject, both on Youtube: "The Century of the Self" and "The Trap," both by Adam Curtis. One is about the rise to power of psychoanalysis in America, and the other about the use of statistics in social control.
My own opinion is that the rise of "syndromes," like ADHD or ASD's is a passing phase. In the case of Autism certainly, the condition is lifelong and cannot be seperated from the individual, but it's no use saying that it's just a 'difference' - it's difficult to live with and, godammit, it's often painful. What is needed is better, specialised provision of education. Indeed, most of these syndromes seem to have been discovered because the children with them were impossible to teach in a normal environment. Once we know how to teach eccentric children, people will no longer have any reason to medicalize their personalities.
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Tangled up and Blue
I definitely see the drawbacks of talking about autism in terms of pathology. Suddenly everything is "a behavior" or "a symptom" or "a treatment" or an "intervention"... The actual person gets lost in the middle of it all.
They lose touch with the fact that autistic people are people and not walking blobs of autism.
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By "normal environment" do you mean the strange ghetto-like institutution to which children are confined during the day, for 12 - 14 years, so that they can not work for money, or otherwise actively contribute to their family or to society, ( so that most people will not want to have more than two of them ), and which is perfectly designed to turn out people with no idea what they need or want unless someone tells them, ( and who make excellent compulsive consumers ), called ... umm, what was it now, ... ah, yes, ... national public school?
Which is only about 100 years old, except in Germany/Prussia, where it was invented some 100 years earlier ...
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I was thinking that the medical establishment has become a bit like the Roman Catholic Church in its heyday, when it used to list sins in incredible detail, and then grant, or sell, pardons to people willing to confess, pray, submit to "therapy, or pay, for treatment/recovery/absolution, and excommunicate those not so docile.
The power it had to include or exclude behaviour and/or people on the basis of its, to most people, incomprehensible texts/rulings/decrees, was very similar to that which medecine has now. Virtue was the equivalent of health.
"Health" is as subjective/socially constructed as virtue.
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Last edited by ouinon on 26 Mar 2009, 4:35 pm, edited 2 times in total.
By "normal environment" do you mean the strange ghetto-like institutution to which children are confined during the day, for 12 - 14 years, so that they can not work for money, or otherwise actively contribute to their family or to society, ( so that most people will not want to have more than two of them ), and which is perfectly designed to turn out people with no idea what they need or want unless someone tells them, ( and who make excellent compulsive consumers ), called ... umm, what was it now, ... ah, yes, ... national public school?
Which is only about 100 years old, except in Germany/Prussia, where it was invented some 100 years earlier ...
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Yes.
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Also, I think that there's the issue of people having and employers high expectations and scheduling demands these days. If something goes wrong or is done inefficiently, the question: "Why?" is asked and people can be seen as "defective" rather than blaming the system itself.
There's also a "You can do it!" culture, which isn't bad in itself, but on the "flip-side", people can set unrealistic expectations for themselves to achieve. When they don't achieve or do things as well as they'd like, they can get very depressed and ask: "What's wrong with me?".
Perhaps the only thing that's "wrong" with them is they are individual, fallible, human beings stuck in a system.
If people aren't advancing/changing their careers, relationships or life they can feel lost. Since their friends and family may be too busy to talk to them, they may enlist the help of a therapist.
Some people may just learn/train better through mentorship/individual learning and may not have been exposed to a learning/working environment that's best for them.
More demands, more pressure to achieve, more unease, more diagnoses?
Then again self awareness of strengths and weaknesses can be a useful thing if used positively.
What if some people (on the milder end of the scale) really can't help being the way they are and instead of "diseased" are just "different"?
The power it had to include or exclude behaviour and/or people on the basis of its, to most people, incomprehensible texts/rulings/decrees, was very similar to that which medecine has now. Virtue was the equivalent of health.
"Health" is as subjective/socially constructed as virtue.
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I think you can draw some parallels with the RC church, in that you have an establishment with exclusive access to 'the truth,' but the big difference is that the truths of Christianity were absolute and unchanging whilst scientific truths are arrived at (we hope) honestly, based on evidence and will be refined/improved as more data is collected. We can only ask that the medical establishment is independent and doesn't allow itself to be used by outside interests, eg. pharmaceutical companies.
Using drugs to control the symptoms of psychological problems or 'disorders' (in the broad sense - I don't really know the lingo of this) is surely a big mistake, especially in children. In those cases, I totally agree with you - the child is being drugged and coerced for the benefit of other people.
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Try drawing some parallels to voodoo and mind-control....And making it a law-- that corporations must poison the masses as well as the environment if and only if such poisoning benefits their shareholders.
The way to steal the life-force of a people is to cut off their access to the truth. And the way to health and freedom is through the truth----no matter how painful that truth may be.
When access to the truth is controlled and limited by people in power with the desire to subjugate and enslave.... hello..mission control, we've got a problem. And awakening to the truth is the only power effective enough to get us out of this problem.
What we reap from the medicalization of sociey:
-Convert badness to sickness because sickness is subject to scientific research and badness isn't. Science is biased. Science is primarily [but not entirely] owned by the status quo. Research grants are accessed by and through the status quo. Authority rules money. And money rules science.
Take out the middleman [$$$] and the equation is:
......................Status quo controls Scientific Research..................
When differences are pathologized [as they are with autism]...the leverage of the social control hierarchy mechanism is ramped up another notch. The social control hierarchy is one and the same as the pecking order games we are taught to play in gradeschool and work. And if we refuse to play these games, we are often severely punished. Targeted by bullies, fired from jobs, systematically traumatized and conditioned to feel worthless.
-Narrow the range of what is considered acceptable until the majority of the people's behaviors are considered unacceptable [criminal] and/or pathological [diseased]. That way they can be more easily manipulated by the power elite and upper echelons of the social hierarchy.
-Medicalization focuses the source of the problem in the individual because the physical and social environment is toxic, and getting worse by the minute. Large corporations have glutted themselves through making we-the-people and our planet toxic. By placing the blame on we-the-people... and by targeting individual people, the large corporations get off scott free which is what they are required by law to do so that their shareholders benefit and we-the-people lose.
-Medical interventions keep the health care practioners fat and happy. The more hospitals and clinics are privatized, the more they will benefit their shareholders, and the less they will be genuinely concerned about, and obligated to, benefit their patients.
-Any kind of neurological difference, as with autism, can be labeled socially deviant because it doesn't conform with the norm. When it is also pathologized, then individuals so pathologized will be at the mercy of the status quo which has funded the research which has created the drugs....that can then be used at the discretion of health care professionals--to control bad/deviant/different individuals. Being different or deviant is not the same as being sick, but sickness is easier to get control over. When assessing whether or not a person is "bad", the yardstick of conformity is generally used as opposed to the yardstick of ethics or morality or even usefulness to a technological based civilization. A world's peoples arguably constitute that world's greatest resource. It really behooves us not to waste it. Especially when that wastage is us.
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some of us older autistics are tyring to say this on WP ---- There is actually NOTHING wrong with us...we just percieve, process and perform a bit differently.
and the differences - whilst at times difficult and hard - also lead to some things that are amazing.
and so now...the real fun begins.........
Anyone interested should also read Mental Illness: Psychiatry's Phlogiston by Thomas Szasz
His view...
"In physics, we use the same laws to explain why airplanes fly, and why they crash. In psychiatry, we use one set of laws to explain sane behavior, which we attribute to reasons (choices), and another set of laws to explain insane behavior, which we attribute to causes (diseases).
It was also published in the book Everything You Know Is Wrong, edited by Russ Kick.
And my view is that being "autistic" as the NT world wants to call us is nothing wrong. Everyone thinks differently and society is constantly trying to group people in some way...I actually think that they way many NTs think is very wrong...if you are given a list of "autistic" traits vs NT traits, I can assure you that most people would regard the autistic traits more desirable...however, because so many people do not have those traits, well, they gotta make it a "disease" to have them...
That's hilarious.
It all boils down to "disorder", and what defines such.
If a society needs and pays the minimum wage or higher to a person who doesn't talk to them, doesn't work with them, doesn't go to school with them, doesn't interact with them; rocks, flaps and bangs; screams, smashes and crashes at seeing the color blue--you can totally remove "Disorder" from "Autistic Disorder".
O, and I like the taste of Valium; it makes me smash and crash far less when I hear people talk.
That's hilarious.
It all boils down to "disorder", and what defines such.
If a society needs and pays the minimum wage or higher to a person who doesn't talk to them, doesn't work with them, doesn't go to school with them, doesn't interact with them; rocks, flaps and bangs; screams, smashes and crashes at seeing the color blue--you can totally remove "Disorder" from "Autistic Disorder".
O, and I like the taste of Valium; it makes me smash and crash far less when I hear people talk.
Daniel,
Point is valid and well made but I wonder how many people @ WP would agree with you..?.. If society isn't inclined to allow us to survive, our chances of surviving are negligible. If society wants to disregard, disrespect, humuliate and ostracize us--our options are severely limited.
Thank you for the Szasz. Interesting point about society drawing a line based on the perceived possession or absence of "free-will".
And also about society "grouping" people, because it does seem to be that, a "pathological"

A few behaviours/characteristics become justification for grouping people with those characteristics together, as if those characteristics were the most important thing about them, ( as in colour, sex, sexuality, etc, at different epochs ), and not only that but the basis on which these categorisations are arrived at is, as Szasz points out, one of double-standards, or discrimination of some sort, which serves to support some aspect of the status quo.
For instance the interesting demarcation in recent decades between those "who can't help it", and those who apparently can, is used to reinforce a belief in free will, which belief is virtually indispensable for the current functioning of our/Western society. Those who the medical establishment is able to show, ( by scientific studies in neurophysiology etc ) "can't help it", are obviously inferior/dysfunctional according to that value system, because free will does, must, exist, if society is to carry on organising things the way it does.
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The tendency to categorise people by disorders/dysfunctions considered to be at least partly "hard-wired", biochemically/genetically determined, ( to "discover"/invent such conditions ), may be the result of and/or reaction to the many scientific discoveries of the last 100 years which cast doubt on "belief in free-will".
Creating a class of people whose dysfunctions/disorders consist of, supposedly, "not being able to help" the way they behave, bolsters up/reinforces belief in free-will, ( as something which belongs to the "healthy"/functional ). Oddly enough, this makes us the avant-garde in a movement towards understanding that there is no such thing!
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Last edited by ouinon on 28 Mar 2009, 4:27 am, edited 2 times in total.