Mediatization of clinical and contemporany diagnostic pratices

Abstract

This article has as its main objective to associate the notions of the society of the spectacle, neoliberalism, and psychopathology. In the spectacular society, there is a supremacy of the image as the mediation of human relationships. In neoliberalism, on the other hand, we see a specific form of managing suffering, which turns the individual into something akin to a company, with risk management and performance analysis. From this, we observe a shift in the field of psychopathology, where terms like "efficiency" and "deficit" are introduced, indicating that, ultimately, everyone is disordered. Thus, in these societal molds, we perceive an individual who must increasingly demonstrate performance, updating the notion of pathology, which can be seen as one who does not produce and does not consume. In addition to this, this hegemonic discourse is supported by psychology and psychiatry themselves through the dissemination of diagnostic methods and the scientification of habits on social media, making these fields points of ideological and economic maintenance in today's society. Therefore, the individual in modernity becomes one who, exposed to diagnoses and clinical methods as if they were commodities, identifies with the diagnoses in a process that pathologizes life experiences. Faced with a demand for performance at all costs, the individual performs symptoms and diagnoses, which, being objects of consumption, can also represent social approval and no longer a reason for exclusion. Thinking in the field of psychopathology today means thinking beyond the dichotomy of health and disease but also about its capacity for social mobilization.