Medicalization and pharmacology of mental health in the city of San Juan

Abstract

This article investigates the phenomena of the Medicalization and Pharmacology of Mental Health with the aim of knowing how they manifest themselves in the city of San Juan. The analysis was conducted from the eld of Sociology of Health, based on authors with a Marxist approach that enables the understanding of the facts of its character of a market logic within the capitalist system. The results obtained register several categories of analysis for which stand out: the diagnostic criteria of the alternative consumers, the permanence of the Hegemonic Medical Model and the emergence of alternative models, the permanence of the doctor- patient relationship of that Model, the practices of professionals and users, the ways of obtaining and the legality of the market for the sale of psychotropic drugs. The sociological reection allows to problematize and to visualize the advance that the medicalization generates in the control of the bodies in as much they are constructed and they dene as “doctors” social or personal problems that can be adjudged as own of the daily vortex. The scope of these practices generate, as a paradoxical counterpart, that not only health professionals promote these practices, but the users of the medical system demand