Abstract
This chapter seeks to outline the ways in which psy-hegemony operates in Western medicine by analyzing the emergence of pathological individualism since the nineteenth century. Contextualized within, and directly related to the way social relations of power, knowledge, and inequality have historically been structured in contemporary society, the chapter provides a feminist sociological framework that theoretically analyzes, critiques, and challenges the assumptions and problems of patriarchal or dominant ‘psy’ discourses and institutions. The discussion provides the sociological groundwork for approaching women’s distress and struggles as socially structured problems rather than the consequence of flaws or defects of abnormal individuals as seen in the current and popular ‘broken brain hypothesis’. To do so, the chapter outlines patriarchal forces and discusses the theory of psychocentrism to politicize and critique the culture of therapy in contemporary neoliberalism as a ‘sickening society’ invested in individualism, stigmatization, and pathologization. The chapter implicitly questions the over-therapization and thus depoliticization of women’s issues as the sole means to address the individual consequences of socially based problems. Instead, feminist intersectional approaches to women’s mental health should concentrate on creating a non-psychocentric world whose objective is collective care, concern, and cooperation.
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- 1.
I intentionally use the term Christianist over the dominant discourse (Christian and Christianity) to problematize its hegemony as ‘natural’ and ‘normal’ while other religions are suffixed with ‘ist’.
- 2.
Although there is no agreed-upon definition, ‘Big Pharma’ can generally be defined as a term used by critical scholars to problematize the growing power, control, and influence of the pharmaceutical industry in North American society. It is often conceptualized as a social, political, and economic empire with toxic effects on people and the planet due to disease-mongering primarily for profitability rather than medicinal ethics. Other critical terms in the literature that refer to the problematic and mutually lucrative relationship between the psy and pharmaceutical industries include ‘pharmacracy’ (Szasz 2003) and ‘pharmageddon’ (Healy 2012).
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For an excellent critique of ‘resilience’ as a political discourse that promotes the neoliberal agenda, which is really about furthering the resilience of the state and capital, see Mark Neocleous, ‘Resisting Resilience’ in Radical Philosophy, 2013. He writes (n.p.): ‘We know by now just how much “resilience” has become the new fetish of the liberal state. The word falls easily from the mouths of politicians, state departments of all kinds fund research into it, urban planners are now obliged to take it into consideration, disaster recovery systems plan it in their preparations, and academics are falling over each other to conduct research on it. The language of resilience now comes to us “naturally”’.
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Rimke, H. (2018). Sickening Institutions: A Feminist Sociological Analysis and Critique of Religion, Medicine, and Psychiatry. In: Kilty, J., Dej, E. (eds) Containing Madness. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89749-3_2
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