Abstract
After defining medicalization as having a “diagnose and treat” logic, I introduce tensions associated with medicalizing developments influencing counselling. Among the tensions examined will be: (a) counselling as a traditionally pluralistic profession in a mental health profession, (b) medicalization as a response to aspects of the human condition not previously considered medical, (c) medicalizing, counselling discourses , and everyday “self-help,” (d) counselling and pharmaceutical/biomedical responses to problems in living, and (e) social justice , discursive, and other non-medicalizing views of human concerns. The aim of this chapter is to lay out tensions associated with medicalizing counselling, tensions to be revisited in greater depth in later chapters.
The irony of biological reductionism in psychology and psychiatry is that it is essentially an attempt to … use the “de-valued” language of the physical sciences to explain the value-laden (and “messy”) world of human psychology from when they sprang in the first place.
(Thomas and Bracken 2011: 19)
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Strong, T. (2017). Tensions in Medicalizing the Talking “Cure”. In: Medicalizing Counselling. Palgrave Studies in the Theory and History of Psychology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56699-3_1
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