Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit Subscriptions.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

Articles

Does Psychiatry Medicalize Normality?

Ronald Pies MD argues that it doesn’t.

“If sick men fared just as well eating and drinking and living exactly as healthy men do… there would be little need for the science [of medicine].”
– Hippocrates

There has been a great deal of controversy surrounding the recent release of the DSM-5: the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the orthodox reference work for psychiatric diagnosis. Critics claim that it ‘medicalizes’ normal human emotions and reactions. Yet this claim has been subject to very little logical analysis. For the proposition ‘psychiatry is medicalizing normality’ to be true, we would need, first, adequate definitions of the terms ‘medicalizing’ and ‘normality’; and second, convincing evidence that psychiatry is actually doing what the proposition asserts.

…