Faculty Writing: On the Psychiatrization of Resistance Movements; and a Dialectical-Materialist Approach to Fatigue in Biomedicine
Writing for Frontiers in Sociology, Jenny Logan explores how psychiatrization—a normative approach to the interpretation and treatment of mental difference and distress—gets deployed in political contexts as an instrument of discipline and control. Looking at consumer, survivor, ex-patient, and psychosocial disability movements in the Global South, she argues that psychiatrization can thwart the efforts of activists who are working to resist oppressive institutional norms and to “transform how we view both the end goals of mental health treatment and the political valence of mental distress.”
And for Fatigue: Biomedicine, Health & Behavior, Nafis Hasan argues for a dialectical-materialist approach to the study of fatigue, as a biological phenomenon emerging from a complex of cumulative physical, psychosocial, and environmental factors. Such an approach, he writes, with a view to both the philosophy of science and the practice of medicine, helps scientists and treating physicians understand and manage fatigue as a process.