Full Description
Diagnosis is central to medical practice, medical knowledge and research, medicalization dynamics, and health and illness experience. Embedded in social relations, diagnoses reflect and shape social dynamics and cultural concerns. Diagnoses are integral to resource allocation, form the basis for identities, and may become a focal point of turf battles and contested authority. Some diagnoses are willingly embraced, whereas others are strenuously resisted. Some diagnoses come and go as fashions; others persist. A sociological approach to diagnosis therefore occupies a complex intersection of diverse subfields including medical sociology, sociology of knowledge, mental health, deviance, social control, sociology of science, social movements, the body, sexualities, gender, and health and illness. This volume explores the breadth of diagnosis and diagnoses through empirical reports, conceptual work, and theoretical statements from diverse perspectives. Reflecting the multi-faceted nature of the emerging field, the book is arranged in five sections: Frameworks, Context, Contestation, Identity, and Social Control. Sociology of Diagnosis thus provides both a starting point for discussion and means with which to organize the nascent conceptual landscape.
Contents
List of Contributors.
Acknowledgments.
Preface.
Introduction: Looking within from without.
Sociology of Diagnosis: A Preliminary Review.
Diagnosis and Medicalization.
Defining Social Illness in a Diagnostic World: Trauma and the Cultural Logic of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder.
Resisting American Psychiatry: French Opposition to DSM-III, Biological Reductionism, and the Pharmaceutical Ethos.
Labeling, Looping, and Social Control: Contextualizing Diagnosis in Mental Health Care.
From Talk to Action: Mapping the Diagnostic Process in Psychiatry.
"DSD is a Perfectly Fine Term": Reasserting Medical Authority through a Shift in Intersex Terminology.
Resisting Pathology: GID and the Contested Terrain of Diagnosis in the Transgender Rights Movement.
Navigating Professional Knowledges: Lay Techniques for the Management of Conflictual Diagnosis in an AD/HD Support Group.
The Vanishing Diagnosis of Asperger's Disorder.
Hidden Diagnosis: Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder from a Child's Perspective.
Sick but Legitimate? Gender Identity Disorder and a New Gender Identity Category in Japan.
Diagnosing the Criminal Addict: Biochemistry in the Service of the State.
Troubling Diagnoses.
Sociology of Diagnosis.
Advances in medical sociology.
Advances in medical sociology.
Copyright page.
