Medication, Talk Therapy, and The Etiological Considerations That Underlie Mental Health Practice

• In Event: 3129 - Section on Medical Sociology Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 18. Medicalization

Abstract

Since the 1980s, the biomedical model has been the predominant way of conceptualizing and treating mental illness in psychiatry and in the field of mental health at large. Though there is substantial evidence of a range of factors that contribute to the dominance of the biomedical mode (e.g. pharmaceutical companies, managed care, and consumer demand; Conrad 2012), absent from the literature are the voices of practitioners, who offer insight into the attitudes that propel the medicalization of mental health troubles forward. In this paper, I use data from interviews with forty-three mental health practitioners with diverse training backgrounds to show the importance of their thinking about etiology for their attitudes toward medication and talk therapy. I show that practitioners’ training impacts their ideas as to what causes their patients troubles, and I offer evidence that the more they believe in biological etiology, the more likely they are to think medication is a the most useful intervention. Likewise, the more exposure they have to training in talk-therapy, the more likely they are to support its use, though rarely as a sole treatment modality. In practitioners’ descriptions of their rationale for using both medication and talk-therapy is insight into their role in the process of medicalization, one of the important factors that contributes to the high rates of prescribing in the US today.

Author

• Dena T. Smith, University of Maryland (UMBC)