Psychopathology and demedicalization of existence

Phenomenological possibilities for understanding health in contemporary times

Abstract

The article implements a critical look at the contemporary psychopathological phenomenon that associates psychological suffering to the medicalizing process that we will call here the medicalization of existence. With a historical-critical and phenomenological literature, we intend to clarify this phenomenon by pointing out the primacy of the organicist paradigm in contemporary psychopathology supported by Psychopathological Manuals aligned with a technification that stands out for the rapid result of existential madness through medicalization to the detriment of historical-existential processes. The literature review proposes to reflect, at first, on clinical iatrogenesis and political and economic statements dressed as scientificity as a critical epistemological axis for a biologizing classification of health. Then, using psychopathology as a parameter to insert the multiple perspectives on the phenomenon, demonstrating the multidimensional nature of illness. In this sense, phenomenological and historical-critical thinkers will guide us to understand the imperative of technocracy in the primordial ways of understanding the health-disease binomial and we will end by emphasizing the human existential character in everyday senses while being fundamentally suffering for professionals that deal with human suffering.