Medical Model Quotes

“Because doctors can’t name the illness, everyone—the patient's family, friends, health insurance, and in many cases the patient—comes to think of the patient as not really sick and not really suffering. What the patient comes to require in these circumstances, in the absence of help, are facts—tests and studies that show that they might “in fact” have something.”
― Joseph Dumit

“Although it is important to be able to recognise and disclose symptom of physical illnesses or injury, you need to be more careful about revealing psychiatric symptoms. Unless you know that your doctor understands trauma symptoms, including dissociation, you are wise not to reveal too much. Too many medical professionals, including psychiatrists, believe that hearing voices is a sign of schizophrenia, that mood swings mean bipolar disorder which has to be medicated, and that depression requires electro-convulsive therapy if medication does not relieve it sufficiently. The “medical model” simply does not work for dissociation, and many treatments can do more harm than good... You do not have to tell someone everything just because he is she is a doctor. However, if you have a therapist, even a psychiatrist, who does understand, you need to encourage your parts to be honest with that person. Then you can get appropriate help.”
― Alison Miller, Becoming Yourself: Overcoming Mind Control and Ritual Abuse

“a psychiatrist without compassion is a terrifying thing indeed”
― Jamie Deckoff-Jones

“medical knowledges tend to express bodies in terms of what they can’t do, and media representations often value bodies in ways that overlook their uniqueness”
― Anna Hickey-Moody, Deleuze and Masculinity

“In turn, they began to argue that perhaps the problems they all experienced had less to do with their brains being brokem, and more to do with societal failure to accommodate their neurological differences. They thus started to argue for what one 1997 report from the New York Times described as a form of ‘neurological pluralism’. This emphasised the need for the behaviours and processing styles of atypical people to be accepted and supported rather than framed as medical pathologies to be controlled, treated, and cured.”
― Robert Chapman, Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism

“Acknowledgement of the prevalence and impact of trauma challenges psychological theories that localize dysfunction within the individual while ignoring the contribution of social forces on adjustment (Brett, 1996; Ross, 2000).”
― Rachel E. Goldsmith

“Every medical problem is a combination of the biological, the psychological and the social. It is only the weighting of each that changes.”
― Suzanne O'Sullivan, The Sleeping Beauties: And Other Stories of Mystery Illness

“The dominant medicalised narrative suggested that being autistic made me somehow tragic, broken, and in need of fixing (…) indicating that there was something inherently wrong with me”
― Robert Chapman, Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism

“Through the neurodiversity lens I began to wonder, for instance, whether since the very start, I had been disabled by a neuronormative society. This, I came to see, had hindered my learning, my development, and my prospects right from the beginning of life. I also began to understand my trauma and mental illness as stemming from not just relative poverty and parental neglect but also a structurally ableist world.”
― Robert Chapman, Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism