A brilliant article for you to read at the end of your work week, focusing on the medicalisation of psychological problems and the bad use of diagnosis. I saw this published in the Sydney Morning Herald, from an original source in the Daily Telegraph in the UK.
Has the drive to identify all illnesses created a ‘fiction’ of psychiatry?
In his riveting tale of how psychiatrists ”medicalise” human suffering, Gary Greenberg recounts that, in 1850, a physician called Samuel Cartwright reported a new disease in the highly respected New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal.
Cartwright named it drapetomania, from the ancient Greek drapetes for a runaway slave; in other words, here was a disease that ”caused Negroes to run away”. It had one primary diagnostic symptom – ”absconding from service” – and a few secondary ones, including ”sulkiness and dissatisfaction just prior to flight”.
