ABSTRACT
In a discussion of psychiatric “disorders without borders”, Nikolas Rose argues that:
By invoking the notion of “languages of description and explanation” that shape human discontents, Rose hints at what I shall here address as “languages of suffering”; that is to say, vocabularies that we use to interpret, make sense of, and regulate our experiences of distress, discontents or what Thomas Szasz famously called “problems in living” (Szasz, 1961). Rose’s own recent work has pointed to the roles of biomedicine (Rose, 2007) and the neurosciences (Rose & Abi-Rached, 2013) in shaping our current ideas of mental disorder and also our very image of what a human being is. According to Rose, the human being is becoming a “neurochemical self” (Rose, 2003). Peter Conrad’s infl uential analysis of the medicalization of society (Conrad, 2007) is now being developed into analyses of biomedicalization and pharmaceuticalization (Abraham, 2010), emphasizing the functions of Big Pharma in defi ning health and illness for people in the 21st century.
