An Ethical Analysis of Medicalization and Infant Mental Healthcare, 2025, Lim

[Dolphin]

I haven’t read this. I just thought I’d highlight it due to the mention of CFS (see post #2)

An Ethical Analysis of Medicalization and Infant Mental Healthcare - Journal of Bioethical Inquiry

The field of infant mental health has been met with some scepticism by those who question the role of the mental health professions in this space. In this paper I will consider a possible ethical objection to the extension of medical jurisdiction over infancy and parenting, informed by the...

link.springer.com

An Ethical Analysis of Medicalization and Infant Mental Healthcare​

• Izaak T. Lim

Abstract​

The field of infant mental health has been met with some scepticism by those who question the role of the mental health professions in this space. In this paper I will consider a possible ethical objection to the extension of medical jurisdiction over infancy and parenting, informed by the critical tradition of medicalization studies. In part I of the paper, I will give particular attention to three potentially harmful consequences of medicalization on infants and their families—the expansion of medical social control, the individualization of human suffering, and the pathologization of human behaviour and variation. In part II, I will provide an ethical defence of infant mental health, addressing the objections raised by a medicalization-based critique. I will conclude in part III that medicalization is not always bad for infants and their families, and that, in the case of infant mental health, there is a mutually reinforcing relationship between medicalization and infant rights claims to the fundamental conditions for pursuing a good life.

 

[Dolphin]

“This is reminiscent of an argument put by Illich, one of the earliest and most polemic critics of medicalization, who warned that the capacity of individuals and societies to care for themselves and cope with sickness, pain, and death would be undermined by medicalization (Illich 1975). In his view, dependence on medical care leads to “social iatrogenesis,” the process by which “medical practice sponsors sickness by reinforcing a morbid society that encourages people to become consumers of curative, preventive, industrial and environmental medicine” (Illich 1976, 33). The growing number of functional somatic syndromes, such as chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, and irritable bowel syndrome, which present with persistent and debilitating physical symptoms without an identifiable organic cause, could be compelling realizations of Illich’s prediction. According to psychiatrists Barsky and Borus (1995), medicalization fosters somatization by amplifying mild and benign bodily distress, alarming us about the potential pathological significance of minor physical symptoms and uncomfortable body states, leading to the enthusiastic pursuit of medical scrutiny and adoption of medical intervention.”

 

[rvallee]

Medicalization is the process by which human conditions and problems come to be defined and treated as medical condition

Never bothered to look at the definition before and oh my, they got it completely backward. The exact opposite has been systematically disastrous. It's not even possible to be more wrong, this is the maximum level of being wrong.

The problem with mental health is the same as with LLMs: confident bullshit is rewarded far more often than it is punished, and here failure is rewarded. This discipline is literally more incompetent than technology everyone loves to criticize as being incompetent and lacking any true intelligence. And, sure enough, zero intelligence to be found here.

 

[rvallee]

The most absurd thing is that taking a saner definition of medicalization to simply mean "when doctors do their job of treating sick people working in a health care system" has nothing to do with judgment, it is not medicine who decides whether a health issue is medical or not. Illness is medical, whether medicine recognizes it or not is irrelevant, but they can still fail the process by deciding otherwise, or failing to recognize something as being part of their expertise. Which reflects very poorly on the overall expertise.

But foundational to this ideology is that they, in fact, decide what is medical or not. Not as neutral arbiters, although this is what they think they do, but closer to a "playing god" kind of thing, explicitly out of the definition of psychosomatic models, where if they don't understand it it can't exist, as close to an assertion of both omniscience and omnipotence as it gets without someone declaring themselves godlike.

All of which, for sure, is completely incompatible with professional practice. This is simply the old ways of doing things, not just pre-science but pre-Enlightenment, and it's incompatible with good outcomes. Hence why outcomes not just for us, but for mental health in general, are so atrocious: the system is designed in a way that makes it impossible to achieve anything, by basing everything on judgment, and entirely ignoring science in the process.