Module 2: Medicalization and Reframing Expertise
Medicalization and Control
Medicalization assigns medical meaning to certain behaviours and conditions, then positions medical practices as the method of treatment and resolution. Because disability tends to be identified as a “medical” issue, disabled people often find that every part of our lives becomes imbued with medical meaning. As disability scholar and activist Oliver (1990) notes, all our problems become defined as medical problems, and therefore are seen as best resolved by medicine.
More significantly, medicalization is socially and politically useful. It offers powerful stakeholders—such as , insurance companies, and pharmaceutical corporations—the means to establish interventions that appear neutral, even benevolent, while actually consolidating their own interests. For healthcare professionals, this means working within systems where diagnoses and medical frameworks can both enable care and function as tools of regulation that shape whose needs are recognized and whose authority is constrained.
From Diagnosis to Control
Canadian disability justice writer A.J. Withers (2024) highlights how “medicalization works to identify new categories of deviance from the norm, and as new disabilities are created and disability is individualized, the social phenomena involved in the process of medicalization are erased” (p. 98).
For example, we invite you to engage further with the works of Clare (2017) and Bailey and Peoples (2017), listed in the works cited. They trace how diagnosis has been used to dehumanize and control, starting in the 1850s with conditions like Drapetomania and dysaesthesia aethiopica, through “protest psychosis” in the 1960s, to “suicide by police” in the past decade (see also Meerai et al., 2016; Jackson, 2003; Metzl, 2020; and Schalk, 2023).
Each reading illustrates how medicine works in concert with systems of slavery, , policing, and to control populations and maintain dominant, primarily white Eurocentric interests. Diagnoses, while often imbued with scientific and medical objectivity, mask their power to control, confine, and pathologize, particularly when they are taken up within legal, carceral, and administrative systems.
Media Moment
Black youth face barriers in mental health care access: experts.
This article offers an example of how anti-Black racism directed towards Black male youth is medicalized. Consider how it presents a barrier to accommodation and helpful resources. According to the article, what role does anti-Black racism play within the psychiatric and healthcare system? How does this trap young Black men in “the sticky web of criminalization” (e.g., Nanda, 2019)?
Key Takeaways: Medicalization and Reframing Expertise
- Looking at our bodies, lives, and social organization through the medical lens “came to be accepted as the authoritative account of disability” (Stone, 1987).
- The medical model approaches disability as a problem to be identified, classified, and corrected, assuming an ideal body and mind and treating deviation from these standards as abnormal and in need of medical intervention (Elliott & Dreer, 2014).
- Ideas of health, normalcy, and impairment are not fixed or objective; they are shaped by social values, institutional priorities, and relations of power (Bailey & Peoples, 2017).
- Diagnosis plays a central role in medicalization: it can enable access to care, supports, and accommodations, while also acting as a gatekeeping mechanism that determines who is recognized as legitimately disabled and who is not.
- Systems that govern diagnosis are always intersectional. They do not operate equally across populations, and they can reinforce existing systems of racism, colonialism, classism, and ableism by shaping whose suffering is believed, whose needs are prioritized, and whose differences are contained or excluded.
A political and economic philosophy that prioritizes minimal government intervention, reduced public spending, and more individual responsibility.
A system in which a population establishes control over a foreign territory, exploiting its resources, people, and land, often leading to long-lasting social, economic, and cultural impacts.
a social system where heterosexual men have power and authority over others.
