ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the problem of cumulative trauma disorders (CTDs) from a psychosocial perspective. It will be argued here that CTDs present problems relating to definition of illness. They cannot be understood if viewed solely as consequences of enduring neurophysiological effects from cumulatively stressing body structures or processes. It is held, further, that emergence and growth of the problem of CTDs relates significantly to psychosocial effects in society. A growing number of people have become ready to identify generalized suffering as a problem for which the health-care system has solutions. This increasing demand from society interacts with a health-care system too dedicated to biological reductionism: an insistence on ‘finding’ pathophysiologic or neurobiologic explanations for distress. The health-care system, eager to be of help, medicalizes suffering by applying ill-founded or poorly grounded diagnostic labels, to which treatments are then applied with, at best, mixed results.
