Mental health practitioners in conjunction with the mental health advocacy community and the pharmaceutical companies appear to have gained control over conceptualization of mental illness. Because of the power we have given to "experts" to redefine deviant behavior as medical problems, our lives are increasingly controlled by a medical elite. Dr. Paul McHugh is among the few psychiatrists who have decried this development. As he says, "Whether treating the bored little boy in a crowded classroom, the oppositional teen, or the overworked and angry adult, today's psychiatrists are like 'mental cosmetologists' ever ready to chemically normalize any example of human psychological diversity that exceeds the current limits of social tolerance."
Last year [2001], doctors wrote more than 96 million prescriptions for serotonin reuptake inhibitors, a class of antidepressants including Paxil. The practice of medicalizing deviance has encouraged the dangerous fantasy that life's every passing imperfection can be clinically diagnosed and alleviated, if not eliminated, by pharmacological intervention through pushbutton remedies. Practitioners like McHugh, at the risk of being called "old fashioned," maintain that a model focusing on growth, maturity and responsibility is the only rational response to the disease model of deviance that threatens to diminish us all.
Anne Hendershott, The Politics of Deviance, p.63
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