To each his own trauma: medicalise society instead of self-help

One of the problems with our society is that unobjectifiable health restrictions are being established as grounds for disability – restrictions which, in the majority of cases, bear no significant impact on the ability to work or are even non-existent (medicalisation). As a result, those who are affected are impaired in personal and economic aspects and society has to bear high, avoidable costs. Medicalisation is primarily a matter of legal practice and the consideration of evidence. Since consideration of evidence is more or less based on gut instinct, same is proven as hardly comprehensible in most cases. Non objectives reasoning, errors in reasoning and poor medical assessments could influence court verdicts. In many ways, this reflects the development of today's society, which regards anything involving suffering as pathological (pathological society). People are nowadays so systematically driven that they have enormous self-help capacity, namely in the area of mental illness. The health concept of the WHO has been proven unfortunate. It promotes lifestyle medicine. The danger that the healthy are being turned into the ill is increasing.
The fundamental question to our society and our legal practice is whether to support the development towards the pathologisation and medicalisation of every little ache and pain and to continue to exaggerate the concept of trauma (those who want it, will get their diagnosis; also healthy individuals, who do not yet realise how colloquial they really are) – at costs to the tune of millions.

Rolf P. Steinegger
Freiburger Sozialrechtstage 2012
To each his own trauma mTJI (mild traumatic justice injury): Medicalisation instead of resilience?

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