Dana Becker - The Medicalization of Women's Suffering
Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health
Mad in America
4.7 • 213 Ratings
🗓️ 16 February 2022
⏱️ 43 minutes
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Summary
Dana Becker is professor emeritus of social work and social research at Bryn Mawr College and has practiced as a psychotherapist for over three decades. With a doctorate in psychology and a master's degree in social work, she has been an equal-opportunity critic of both fields in her work on the effects of therapeutic culture on women in the US.
These themes are explored in her books, Through the Looking Glass: Women and Borderline Personality Disorder (Westview Press, 1997) and The Myth of Empowerment: Women and the Therapeutic Culture in America (NYU Press, 2005). Her most recent book, One Nation under Stress: The Trouble with Stress as an Idea (Oxford University Press, 2014), tackles the effects of the therapeutic culture through an examination of the ideological work currently performed by the stress concept. Her work has received awards from the Society for the Psychology of Women.
Becker is known for her work on the use of borderline personality disorder to medicalize women's problems. She has also advanced some significant criticisms of the way we talk about and deal with stress in our society and noted how feminist psychotherapy had been weakened in its revolutionary potential.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Mad in America podcast, your source for science, psychiatry and social justice. |
| 0:14.1 | Hello, everyone, and welcome to Mad in America. This is your host for today, Ayurdi Dhar. |
| 0:20.0 | I'm an assistant professor of psychology at |
| 0:22.2 | Mount Mary University and a spotlight interviewer for Mad in America. Our guest for today is Dr. |
| 0:28.1 | Dana Becker. She's currently Professor Emeritus of Social Work and Social Research at Brynman College. |
| 0:34.5 | Dr. Becker has also practiced as a psychotherapist for over three decades. She's the |
| 0:39.6 | author of numerous books and articles, and her interests range from criticisms of concepts of |
| 0:44.7 | stress and positive psychology, the medicalization of female suffering via the PTSD diagnosis, |
| 0:51.7 | and earlier the borderline diagnosis. We will talk about this and a lot more. |
| 0:57.1 | Dr. Becker, welcome to Matt in America. Oh, thanks very much. So let's jump into this. |
| 1:02.9 | Now, you have raised concerns about something called therapeutic culture. Could you just |
| 1:09.1 | briefly tell us what it is and what are some of your concerns and criticisms of therapeutic culture. So do you just briefly tell us what it is? And what are some of your concerns |
| 1:13.0 | and criticisms of therapeutic culture? In what we call therapeutic culture, which is the culture |
| 1:19.3 | we're all swimming in, the air around us is infused with psychological concepts, values, and institutions predicated on those. |
| 1:31.3 | So the idea is that in therapeutic culture, the psyche is the principal object of our attention. |
| 1:40.3 | So it's the psychological is seen as a main source of problems in our society and the |
| 1:49.0 | health. And I put in quotes of our psyches seem to be an ultimate goal. So these shared |
| 1:57.3 | assumptions about the psyche and its importance and the importance of the self |
| 2:02.6 | shape our values, they shape our behaviors, and even institutions. So a major critique then is that |
| 2:12.0 | this emphasis on the psyche and the self really makes the world less visible, makes the problems of society, |
| 2:22.9 | the structural problems, the institutional problems, less visible to us. |
| 2:28.6 | And because I have done a lot of work looking at sort of how individualism shapes our psychological culture or the |
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