Description
Book SynopsisUsing interviews with forty-three practitioners in the New York City area, this book offers insight into how the medical model maintains its dominant role in mental health treatment. Smith explores how practitioners grapple with available treatment models, and make sense of a field that has shifted rapidly in just a few decades.
Trade Review"This is a compelling project. Too often sociologists assume that the blueprint laid out by the DSM is equivalent to practice. This colors our discussions of medicalization in general, perhaps leading us to overstate its reach and breadth and obscuring the ways it is negotiated in practice. By delving more deeply into these practices – and the reasoning behind them – Smith’s research has great potential to bring nuance to the discussion of medicalization. The book wants to go beneath our general discussions of medicalization to see how it plays out in practice. Through a comparison of three groups of clinicians, she reveals the distinct dilemmas clinicians face, as well as their responses to the prevailing paradigm in practice. These play out in often unanticipated ways."
— Owen Whooley, author of Knowledge in the Time of Cholera: The Struggle over American Medicine in the Nineteenth Ce
"Highly recommended."— Choice
"Dena Smith provides us with an analysis of the medicalization of mental disorder, and its impact on the conceptions and treatments in psychiatry. Basing her work on 43 interviews with mental health professionals, Smith provides new insights on the role of medicalized perspectives on psychiatric work.” — Peter Conrad, Brandeis University
Table of ContentsFrom meaning-making to medicalization
Practitioner portraits and pathways to practice
The promise of 'imperfect communication' and the 'prison' of rigid categorization : the DSM in practice
Etiological considerations and the tools of the trade : the role of medication and talk therapy in practice
The consequences of the biomedical model for practice and practitioners : psychodynamic therapy in a biomedical world
Conclusion : the dangling conversation : ambiguity in mental health practice
