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Certain forms of online behaviour are increasingly being referred to in medical terms and treated as diseases, a process known as “medicalisation”. This study examines the process by which online behaviour appears to be increasingly medicalised and suggests some possible reasons why non‐medical problems are defined and treated as forms of illness. Particular attention is paid to a condition that is increasingly referred to by medical professionals as “online addiction” or “Internet dependence”. The study then explains some of the social and psychological consequences of medicalisation for online users who have been diagnosed as “ill”. These include guilt, a loss of self‐confidence, social ostracism, and self‐fulfilling behaviour. Some weaknesses of the medicalisation construct are discussed, and alternative explanations are offered.

Using data from the European Social Survey, the purpose of this paper is to examine the individual-level determinants of the attitudes toward the use of medicines to treat common conditions such as hair loss and weight gain.

The authors estimate ordered logit models in which the five conditions inquired about in the survey are the dependent variables.

The variation in the average approval scores for medicine use implies differing degrees of medicalization for the five conditions inquired about in the survey, and the associations observed in the multivariate analysis reveal that part of the subjectivity in attitudes can be attributed to basic personal characteristics, namely age, gender, and education. Self-evaluations of general health, happiness, religiosity, and political ideology are also found to influence people’s attitudes in predictable ways.

The examinations point to the shortcomings of the available data sets in sorting out the roles of different factors – such as the presence of effective treatments without side effects – in reaching the observed attitudes for medicine use.

The empirical findings suggest that the overuse of medicines can become a more serious problem in the near future in aging European societies.

The authors demonstrate that higher approval scores among younger and more educated people on the whole and among women with respect to hair loss suggest that more medicalized attitudes are not necessarily found among groups the most likely to have the condition in question, but those who find it the most difficult to imagine themselves being in that situation.

The current literature on attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) shows a tangled picture of its etiology and diagnosis. It directs at over-medicalization in ADHD cases due to the pharmaceutical-based models surrounding its treatment. Further, the authors observed the negligible reporting of India’s ADHD scenario in the reviewed literature. Thus, this study aims to explore the status of ADHD in India’s urban setting through a pilot study.

Social constructivist viewpoint guided this study. The authors conducted the pilot in two phases: face-to-face semi-structured qualitative interviews with 11 mental health professionals in the first phase, and, in the second phase, five mental health professionals responded to an online survey with same questions. After qualitative analysis, four major themes were identified: participants’ opinions on ADHD etiology, issues in diagnosis, social context of ADHD and alternatives to medication.

The findings highlight the need to re-visit the ADHD narrative in the Indian context. These findings also emphasize future investigation on the medicalization of ADHD in India.

A countrywide epidemiological survey is required to explore the distribution of the disorder to standardize diagnosis and treatment procedures pan-India. This paper is an attempt to iron out the ADHD-related information that needs further exploration and research.

With in-depth interviews of mental health professionals, the study explores the state of ADHD in an urban setting in India. Future research must build on the current findings to establish the etiological and diagnostic framework of ADHD.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the historical roots of the modern relationship between health and education. The author draws on the work of Michel Foucault and Georges Canguilhem to make the case that the transformation of medical knowledge in the early nineteenth century created new ways knowing that was the foundation of a modern relationship between health and education.

Using the archives of ophthalmology, the author demonstrates how new medical knowledge and scientific methods were the basis of investigations of the eyesight of school children in the early nineteenth century. These investigations reflected the nineteenth century scientific ethos that placed a premium on techniques such as counting, measuring, statistical reasoning, and empirical observation to form the grounds of legitimacy of an autonomous “objective” knowledge. The modern relationship between health and education was an instance of a generalized medico-scientific interest in the health of populations that utilized the methods of empirical positivist science whose speculative interest was aimed at defining the normal.

Scientific investigations of the eyesight of school children in the early nineteenth century contributed to the formation of an anatomo-politics of the body and a biopolitics of population through a “medical mathematics” that defined a relation between eyesight, health and education.

This study illustrates how sources such as the archives of ophthalmology can broaden and deepen our understanding of the relation between health and education.

Historically, research on perceptions of health either converged upon the meanings created and proposed by specialists in the healthcare industry or focused on people who have medical conditions. This approach has failed to capture how the meanings and notions of health have been evolving as medicine extends into non-medical spheres and has left gaps in the exploration of how the meanings surrounding health and well-being are constructed, negotiated and reproduced in lay discourse. This paper aims to fill this gap in the understanding of the perceptions surrounding health by investigating consumers’ digitized visual accounts on social media.

Textual network and visual content analyses of posts extracted from Instagram are used to derive conclusions on definitions of health and well-being as perceived by healthy lay individuals.

Research demonstrates that digital discourse of health is clustered around four F’s, namely, food, fitness, fashion and feelings, which can be categorized with respect to their degrees of representation on a commodification/communification versus bodily/spiritual well-being map.

Our knowledge about the meanings of health as constructed and reflected by healthy lay people is very limited and even more so about how these meaning-making processes is realized through digital media. This paper contributes to theory by integrating consumers’ meaning-making literature into health perceptions, as well as investigating the role of social networks in enabling a consumptionscape of well-being. Besides a methodological contribution of using social network analysis on textual data, this paper also provides valuable insights for policy-makers, communicators and professionals of health.

Efforts to establish harm reduction interventions in Italy have persisted since the mid-1990s. Despite this, no sanctioned SIF has ever been implemented. The purpose of this paper is to provide information about a 10 year unsanctioned drug user-run SIF experience in Italy called Stanzetta.

The aim of the paper is to assess how Stanzetta met its objectives. Analysis was conducted compiling narrative accounts from the staff working in the NSP, which is adjacent to the Stanzetta, and conducting a simple frequency analysis of the available statistical data.

The Stanzetta unsanctioned SIF has been running for ten years and continues to be vulnerable due to its legal status. Being open 24 h/days has maximised its accessibility, but at the same time, it has encouraged a misuse of the Stanzetta. Although not trained, drug users became self-empowered to run the Stanzetta and to keep it clean, but the hygiene-health aspect is seen as one of the greatest challenges by the NSP professional staff. Over 10 years, not a single overdose death has been recorded. Drug use in the park has shifted from more visible places to the Stanzetta. As a result, the abandoned syringes have diminished in number and those disposed of correctly have increased. Moreover, no complaints from citizens or law enforcement were ever made. The neighbourhood acceptance seems to be the main goal of the peer-run unsanctioned SIF.

The paper is based on a narrative account from the point of view of the professional staff involved, and results are specific to the context in which the study was conducted. Because of the chosen approach, the research results lack scientific generalisability. A relevant limitation is that no peer was involved in this study. Despite this, the research contributes to the information based on peer-run SIFs and makes a case for the de-medicalisation of SIFs in Europe.

This paper gives visibility to a long-lasting drug user-run SIF experience that was not made public mostly for an unclear legislative background about SIF in Italy.

Efforts to establish harm reduction interventions in Italy have persisted since the mid-1990s and were undertaken primarily in response to epidemics of HIV infection and overdose (DPA, 2017). Despite this, no sanctioned SIF has ever been implemented. Primarily, this study wants to underline the urgency for an SIF pilot in Italy, and secondly the need to consider de-medicalising these services through direct support for peer-based models.

The Stanzetta unsanctioned SIF in Italy that has been running for ten years. Despite this, the venue continues to be vulnerable due to its legal status. For this reason, these results were never made public before. The experience showed a good working synergy between NSP professionals and the SIF peers. This model can be considered as a “light” de-medicalisation form to be explored and eventually to be implemented as a pilot SIF in Italy.

In 2017, the WHO presented a framework of priorities and guiding principles to promote the health of refugees and migrants (WHO, 2017). The purpose of this paper is to analyze a crucial but understudied aspect for the implementation of this framework, namely, healthcare providers’ images of refugees and their use of health services.

A preliminary study first addresses images of refugees and their use of health services derived from the literature. This is followed by an empirical case study of antenatal and delivery service to Eritrean refugee women in Israel. The case study explores providers’ (n=8) images of Eritrean women and their use of services as well as Eritrean women’s (n=10) reflections on their own use of these services, examining the degree to which providers’ images correspond with Eritrean women’s realities.

The preliminary study shows how the literature largely tends to picture refugees as medicalized and disempowered. The case study illustrates that providers of Israeli antenatal and delivery services embrace similar images, although they are more nuanced. The reflections of Eritrean women show that providers’ images partially reflect their realities. However, Eritrean women attribute these images to external constraints, whereas providers attribute these images to innate characteristics of Eritrean women. Together, these findings suggest that implementation of the recently introduced WHO framework is at stake.

This study raises awareness of a crucial but understudied aspect regarding implementation of a recently introduced universal framework for promoting the health of refugees and migrants.

To cover the main trends in health care for the elderly and the issues regarding the competitiveness between public and private organizations that are mainly small to medium‐sized enterprises.

A three‐dimensional longitudinal study: the social policy of public authorities; the ageing process of the French population; and the behavior of the elderly toward retirement homes.

Provides a better understanding of the competition between different modes of accommodation for the elderly. Underlines the crucial role played by non‐profit organizations in the French health sector, i.e. to act as a regulator and buffer between the public sector, which lacks flexibility, and the private sector, which gives a free hand to private interests.

This study is limited to France. It would benefit from being enlarged to cover larger geographical areas, e.g. Europe.

For academics, this method could be replicated in different other fields and sectors. For public decision makers, this work shows how non‐profit organizations could improve cohabitation between public and private organizations in the health‐care system. For managers, this paper contributes toward a better understanding of the accommodation market for the elderly.

This paper deals with the care of the elderly that is nowadays a world‐wide problem. However, opportunities are emerging with a new market for the care for the elderly.

This narrative review aims to examine how trans people with intellectual disabilities are perceived and discussed in the academic literature.

A narrative review was carried out to better understand the positioning of people with intellectual disabilities who identify as trans.

There was a lack of clear terminology, an over medicalization of both people with intellectual disabilities and trans people and evidence that identifying with a non-conforming gender identity was seen as a problem by services. Services need to be better informed about issues around gender identity so that they are able to better support trans people with intellectual disabilities.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no previous literature review has focused only on trans people with intellectual disabilities.