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Conservative because ethnocentric

Posted by girlzRprettiest on 2020-March-08 00:01:45 EST, Sunday
In reply to intrigued... posted by Eeyore on 2020-March-07 04:22:49 EST, Saturday
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As I previously stated, psychiatry is a non-democratic system of social control that formalizes mores and sanctions deviant behaviors. Homosexuality's former status as a "disorder" and pedophilia's continued inclusion in the DSM are a case in point. Just like the former's removal from the DSM coincided with changing cultural attitudes favorable to it, the latter remains classified as a disorder because negative attitudes against it persist. This demonstrates how behaviors officially considered "disordered" are a function of their social acceptability. Basically, in codifying deviant behaviors psychiatry enforces the norms that forbid them.

Aside from bolstering traditionalist, sex-negative norms, psychiatry also polices rebellious behavior. For instance, the disorder known as "oppositional defiant disorder" describes children and adolescents who reject or challenge authority figures. During the diagnostic process, no consideration is made by clinicians as to whether the rebellious behavior is in some way justified or resultant of dysfunctional or oppressive social environments. By placing the onus of the problem on the individual, their surrounding social context is exempted from critique, precluding progressive sociocultural treatment approaches as a means of solving the matter.

The classification of psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia also reinforces norms for "acceptable" behavior. These disorders basically consist of highly idiosyncratic behaviors that are unusual to people who are well-integrated into mainstream society. The formal designation of these behaviors as "medical symptoms" requiring treatment fosters the impression that society's normative behaviors are "natural" and "good," or otherwise justified.

Like all biological determinist theoretical orientations in the social and behavioral sciences, psychiatry is an intrinsically ethnocentric ideology. Because it functions to legitimate the status quo by regulating deviant behaviors and promoting the myth that they are generated by biological rather than sociocultural and political-economic (i.e., environmental) factors, it is thoroughly conservative.

Keep in mind that sociologists have long recognized the medical establishment's role as a system of social control. For further discussion on the topic, refer to medical sociologist Peter Conrad and Drake University sociology professor Joseph W. Schneider's 1980 book Deviance and Medicalization: From Badness to Sickness.

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