All diagnoses are social constructions. This doesn't mean they don't
contain material, embodied elements. It does mean that those elements
can be configured and put together in a variety of ways, and therefore
that their meaning might vary according to how they are constructed. So
hearing voices might be a symptom of 'schizophrenia'; a single symptom
in its own right, amenable to cognitive treatment; a feature of many
people's experience that isn't necessarily pathological; a communication
from god or whatever other deity you favour; a sign that the voice
hearer is possessed, or a witch; and so on.
For an excellent study of how asthma is socially constructed that makes
these issues crystal clear see the opening chapter of:
The Problem of Medical Knowledge: Examining the Social Construction of
Medicine. by Peter Wright, Andrew Treacher (1982)
J.
Tim Anstiss wrote:
> I only understood every second word of the below, at a push, which probably says more about me than the author.
>
> But help me out here (being a simple doctor), in what way is a red, inflamed, swollen, painful, about to burst and cause peritonitis and possibly death appendix (aka appendicitis) a social construction?
>
> I understand appendicitis is a label, and I understand it is shorthand - is this what you mean by "social construction"? - or do you mean something else above and beyond this?
>
> Tim
>
>
>
> David Fryer <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>
> Hi Craig,
> I think the phrase “the conditions problematically diagnosed as depression" is useful because it avoids the over-simplification and depoliticisation of the position you appear to take in this email. The phrase leaves room to acknowledge that depression is diagnosed i.e. is socially constructed with all the involvement of interest groups that implies, that it is problematic as a diagnosis (in the narrow sense that it is quite different from e.g. a diagnosis of appendicitis – though that is also a social construction too of course) and problematic in the wider sense to which Carl Walker alerts us that depression may be a phenomenological and embodied manifestation of societal and political phenomena but it is still dreadful, destructive and very ‘real’ for people manifesting it and not in any useful sense just ‘part of the human condition’ (a positioning which naturalises it and makes it seem inevitable) but a direct consequence of oppressive forms of political, economic
> and social organization which are not inevitable and could be changed by collective decision.
> David
>
>
>
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--
********************************************************
John Cromby
Department of Human Sciences
Loughborough University
Loughborough, Leics
LE11 3TU England
Tel: 01509 223000
Email: [log in to unmask]
Personal webpage: http://www-staff.lboro.ac.uk/~hujc4/
Co-Editor, "Subjectivity": www.palgrave-journals.com/sub
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