scholarly journals Medicalization as a way of life

Author(s):  
Orkideh Behrouzan

Most debates on postwar mental health focus on clinical evaluations of veterans’ and civilians’ individual experiences of wartime ‘trauma’. But the psychological afterlife and the social discord that wars create cannot be reduced to a clinical artifact of individual trauma or be divorced from the historical and cultural meanings that it carries. Generations of war children will continue to remember, process, and work through cultural changes that quietly inscribe past war experiences in their daily lives. This article examines one such cultural shift, namely the medicalization of the memories of the Iran-Iraq War. It illustrates how individuals’ PTSD-like symptoms or alleged depreshen turn the seemingly desocializing act of medicalization on its head, and how diagnosis can become a cultural resource to resocialize the war in the sanitized language of biomedicine. It further suggests that moving beyond an individual and clinical rendition of trauma requires the integration of an anthropological understanding of illness and its cultural situatedness into medical pedagogies.

Skhid ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 43-51
Author(s):  
VOLODYMYR SKVORETS ◽  
IGOR KUDINOV

The relevance of the research problem is that the understanding of socio-cultural transformation allows us to identify social processes that affect the functioning of post-Soviet Ukrainian society. The research subject is the social processes that determine the content and nature of socio-cultural transformation of post-Soviet Ukrainian society. The purpose of the article is to comprehend the impact of socio-cultural changes on the functioning of post-Soviet Ukrainian society. The methodology of the socio-cultural transformation research is based on the use of systematic, logical, historical, dialectical and socio-cultural approaches and methods. The results of scientific research. In post-Soviet Ukraine, the general context of socio-cultural change is due to the implementation of market reforms that have led to privatization, deindustrialization, mass marginalization, transition to a liberal state and depopulation. These processes have led to socio-cultural changes in the lives of Ukrainian citizens. There were important changes in the social sphere, the social structure of the population, the distribution of national wealth, which changed the direction of its movement from the dominance of social development to the predominance of social degradation. There was a change in the social matrix of society’s reproduction: there was a transition from the dominance of the middle classes’ culture to the spread of the culture of the poor, the main feature of which is the struggle for survival. The essence of the socio-cultural transformation of post-Soviet Ukrainian society is the transition from the absolutism of the state to the absolutism of the market, which means the transformation of everything possible into a commodity, and the dominance of commodity-money relations in all spheres of public life. This transition was accompanied by a change in the historical and cultural type of human personality, commercialization, deprofessionalization, as well as the primitivization of public administration. Changes in the culture’s state have complicated the reproduction of society as a whole. The Soviet way of life has been dismantled, and the failure of the social matrix indicates that a new way of life in post-Soviet Ukraine has not yet been formed, and therefore socio-cultural transformation must be aimed at its formation. The practical value of the results lies in substantiating the content of socio-cultural transformation in post-Soviet Ukraine and its impact on the functioning of society.


Author(s):  
L. V. Shabanov ◽  
L. V. Smetankina ◽  
S. V. Lychagina

The purpose of the paper is to consider the modern concept of love (in the framework of the social psychology of the “Man and Woman” relations), reflecting the specificity of scientific approaches in our century. The authors refer to the phenomenon of love in the history of the humanity, which is transformed into a new archetypal reality through global and socio-cultural changes. By method of comparative analysis the authors attempted to trace the dynamics of changes of the rhythm and way of life, reflected in the framework of changes in social relations within the communication space of “male” and “female”, the similarities and differences of this. The authors make a conclusion about the archetypes associated with the conversion of love in consummation of external manifestations. Schematically this process looks like the desire for functional infantilisation of generations that extends in the framework of “birth - death – rebirth” through the archetypal theme of “child” and “hero”; however, individuation (narcissism) leads to a loss of subjectity and the updated archetypal theme of “the disabled hero” is compensated in the image of “anti-love”.


2016 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 41-54
Author(s):  
Terry Regier

Cultural norms and trends are often reflected in patterns of language use. This article explores cultural perceptions of Palestine and Palestinians in the English-speaking world, through two analyses of large linguistic datasets. The first analysis seeks to uncover current conceptions of participants in the Israel-Palestine conflict, by identifying words that are distinctively associated with those participants in modern English usage. The second analysis asks what historical-cultural changes led to these current conceptions. A general theme that emerges from these analyses is that a cultural shift appears to have occurred recently in the English-speaking world, marked by greater awareness of Palestinian perspectives on the conflict. Possible causes for such a cultural shift are also explored.


Author(s):  
Greg Anderson

To conclude the book’ s alternative account of the Athenian politeia, the chapter offers a recursive analysis of the resource flows which made this way of life possible. The result is very different from a conventional modern secular economic analysis. Instead, it treats resource transactions as the lifeblood of a cosmic ecology that united gods, land, and people in a condition of symbiotic interdependency. The most important of all these transactions were those between gods and humans, whereby the latter received secure conditions of existence in exchange for temples, sacrifices, votive treasures, and other often costly ritual offerings. The most important of the resource transactions between humans were marriages, whereby the managerial and reproductive capacities of females were transferred from one household to another, thereby perpetuating the life of the social body. Contrary to the “egalitarian” ethos which moderns believe animated “democratic Athens,” demokratia would also have been unsustainable without the innumerable contributions of resources, material and otherwise, that were made by a relatively small number of super-wealthy Athenian households. And in a polis where members typically worked only for themselves, the existence of these ecologically essential super-wealthy households would have been unsustainable without the routine exploitation of slaves.


Author(s):  
Shigehiro Oishi ◽  
Samantha J. Heintzleman

This chapter highlights the contributions that have been made by personality and social psychology, respectively and together, to the science of well-being. Since its humble beginning in the 1930s, the science of well-being has grown to become one of the most vibrant research topics in psychological science today. The personality tradition of well-being research has shown that it is possible to measure well-being reliably, that self-reported well-being predicts important life outcomes, and that well-being has nontrivial genetic origins. The social psychology tradition has illuminated that there are various cultural meanings of well-being, that responses to well-being questions involve multiple cognitive processes, that happiness is experienced often in relationship contexts, and that it is possible to improve one’s well-being. Finally, there are recent methodological integrations of the personality and social psychology perspectives that delineate person–situation interactions.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
N.I. Fisher ◽  
D.J. Trewin

Given the high level of global mobility, pandemics are likely to be more frequent, and with potentially devastating consequences for our way of life. With COVID-19, Australia is in relatively better shape than most other countries and is generally regarded as having managed the pandemic well. That said, we believe there is a critical need to start the process of learning from this pandemic to improve the quantitative information and related advice provided to policy makers. A dispassionate assessment of Australia’s health and economic response to the COVID-19 pandemic reveals some important inadequacies in the data, statistical analysis and interpretation used to guide Australia’s preparations and actions. For example, one key shortcoming has been the lack of data to obtain an early understanding of the extent of asymptomatic and mildly symptomatic cases or the differences across age groups, occupations or ethnic groups. Minimising the combined health, social and economic impacts of a novel virus depends critically on ongoing acquisition, integration, analysis, interpretation and presentation of a variety of data streams to inform the development, execution and monitoring of appropriate strategies. The article captures the essential quantitative components of such an approach for each of the four basic phases, from initial detection to post-pandemic. It also outlines the critical steps in each stage to enable policy makers to deal more efficiently and effectively with future such events, thus enhancing both the social and the economic welfare of its people. Although written in an Australian context, we believe most elements would apply to other countries as well.


2021 ◽  
pp. 009145092110270
Author(s):  
Inger Eide Robertson ◽  
Hildegunn Sagvaag ◽  
Lillian Bruland Selseng ◽  
Sverre Nesvaag

The concepts of identity and recovery capital are recognized as being an embedded part of moving away from a life dominated by drug use. However, the link between these two concepts and the effect of broader social structures, and the normative assumptions underpinning the condition of recovery, is less explored. This article focuses on the social practices of everyday life in the foreground of identity formation, meaning that “who I am” is an inseparable part of “what I do.” A narrative approach was employed to analyze qualitative follow-up data extracted from 48 in-depth interviews with 17 males and females with drug-using experience that were conducted posttreatment on three separate occasions over a period of 2.5 years. Theories of identity formation were employed to analyze the interdependent dynamic between social structure, persona and social resources, and way of life and identity. The analyses identified four narratives related to how people present themselves through the process of changing practices. Following the work of Honneth, we argue that the positive identity formation revealed in these narratives is best understood as a struggle for recognition via the principle of achievement. However, the participants’ self-narratives reflected cultural stories—specified as formula stories—of “normality,” “addiction,” and the “addict,” which work into the concepts of self and confine options of storying experiences during the recovery process. This study demonstrate that the process of recovery is culturally embedded and constitutes a process of adaption to conventional social positions and roles. We suggest challenging dominant discourses related to “addiction as a disease” and “normality” in order to prevent stigma related to drug use and recovery. In so doing, it may contribute to broaden conditions for identity (trans)formation for people in recovery.


2021 ◽  
pp. 014616722110244
Author(s):  
Steffen Zitzmann ◽  
Lukas Loreth ◽  
Klaus Michael Reininger ◽  
Bernd Simon

Our own prior research has demonstrated that respect for disapproved others predicts and might foster tolerance toward them. This means that without giving up their disapproval of others’ way of life, people can tolerate others when they respect them as equals (outgroup respect–tolerance hypothesis). Still, there was considerable variation in the study features. Moreover, the studies are part of a larger research project that affords many additional tests of our hypothesis. To achieve integration along with a more robust understanding of the relation between respect and tolerance, we (re)analyzed all existing data from this project, and we synthesized the results with the help of meta-analytic techniques. The average standardized regression coefficient, which describes the relationship between respect and tolerance, was 0.25 (95% confidence interval [CI] = [0.16, 0.34]). In addition to this overall confirmation of our hypothesis, the size of this coefficient varied with a number of variables. It was larger for numerical majorities than for minorities, smaller for high-status than for low-status groups, and larger for religious than for life-style groups. These findings should inspire further theory development and spur growth in the social-psychological literature on tolerance.


2010 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 251-289 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Matthews

This study examines representations of the railroad in art, poetry, and literature printed in publications targeting middle- and upper-class audiences. It uses these sources to investigate how elite groups viewed the process of change spurred by the rapid modernization that defined the Porfiriato. It argues that the elite used this literature and art to define themselves as modern citizens and diffuse ideas about the benefits of progress, the success of the regime, and the ways civilized individuals should behave. It also shows that these groups shared anxieties about the social and cultural changes spurred by modernization.


PEDIATRICS ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 88 (1) ◽  
pp. 186-187
Author(s):  
RITAMARIE MOSCOLA

To the Editor.— In the article "Primary Care: The Future of Pediatric Education"1 Dr Alpert addresses many issues facing pediatrics. I agree with his list of problems. However, I doubt that the social, economic, and cultural changes he describes will ever occur. My informal survey of pediatricians in practice is a song of frustration and boredom. The ringing telephone provides the rhythm. How does a patient-physician relationship develop in an environment of missed appointments, 3 AM emergency department visits, and managed care? Many families change physicians whenever employers change health benefits packages.


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