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