The article is from the public number: cultural aspect (ID: whzh_21bcr) , author: Xiao Xin Yi, from the title figure: Figure worm creativity.
Introduction:
According to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) , data show that more than 350 million people worldwide suffer from depression, and the growth rate of patients in the past ten years has been about 18%. It is estimated that the number of pan-depressed people in China currently exceeds 95 million (data from People’s Daily Online) , and the number has been increasing in recent years. How did this happen?
This article discusses how depression enters China, how patients participate in the construction, and how they play against the medical system. It explains the cause of the widespread diffusion of depression from the perspective of social construction. The author points out that medicalization is not only the construction of physicians’ power or the industry, government, and academic media, but also the result of people actively seeking various medical methods to participate. Despite the complex process of game, conflict, compromise, partial adoption, etc. between the public and the medical power of western medicine, “depression” was eventually shaped into a widely used disease name and promoted a new medical order.
The article was originally published in “Society” No. 2 of 2016. This article is an excerpt. Thank you for your authorization. It only represents the author’s point of view and is for everyone to consider.
A Sociological Analysis of “How Depression Arose”: From the Perspective of Neoliberal Globalization
Emergence of depression from the perspective of social construction
The World Health Organization (WHO) states that depression will become one of the most prevalent diseases in the world in 2020, second only to ischemia. Sexual heart disease. Data from the Chinese Mental Health Association show that by 2012, there were more than 30 million patients with depression in China. The actual number of patients is increasing, and the number is increasing.
At present, the discussion of “how depression occurs” is mainly focused on the fields of medicine and psychology.
These research videosJiao emphasized the internal cause explanations of genes, hormones or psychological microcosms, but ignored the detailed explanations of social environmental factors, but simply attributed all external causes to “stress”. The analysis of the social structure of depression can partially explain the causes of depression, but there are two limitations:
First, social structure is only a trigger for mental illness, and it is not enough to answer why contemporary mental illness is depression rather than others;
Second, the transformation of social structure can be regarded as a factor that causes depression. However, it is also necessary to observe the interactions between patients and the surrounding network and environment, including many complex mechanisms and contingencies. Social structure is only a potential condition that triggers depression, and does not necessarily cause someone to have depression.
In this situation, the “social construction” factor becomes even more important. The “social construction” perspective discusses the formation of depression and the knowledge-power relationship behind it, as well as how patients participate in construction and how to play a game with mental health.
Medical construction of the industry-government-educational media complex
The emergence of the name “depression” is the result of recent refinement of medical development. Prior to the name depression, neurasthenia was a widely used name.
“Neurasthenia” is a concept proposed by American neurologist George Bernard in 1868. The second edition of DSM in 1968 described it as a pathological condition characterized by chronic weakness, irritability and fatigue.
In the 1940s and 1950s, American psychiatrists began to debate whether neurasthenia was an independent disease. Neurasthenia was gradually defined as a disease that was piled up with many symptoms without internal connections. Therefore, neurasthenia was deleted in the third edition of DSM and replaced with better distinguished disease names such as depression and anxiety.
There are currently two recognized diagnostic criteria for depression in the world: one is the ICD developed by the World Health Organization, and the other is the DSM developed by the American Psychiatric Association. They are interlinked in the core symptoms of depression. However, depression is widely recognized, and it is not just the social construction of the public health system. The social construction of the industry-government-educational media is the key to the widespread penetration of the disease name into all levels of society.
Before the introduction of neoliberal globalization, pharmaceutical companies were not as fast at developing new drugs, and most clinical trials were limited to specific