Default Depression: How We Now Interpret Human Distress as Mental Illness

In this course, Anthony Smith, author and researcher, challenges the medicalisation of distress through examination of the situational approach, which acknowledges the predominant association of situational distress rather than mental illness with suicide, though there are linkages. Showing how the biomedical model of the prevailing paradigm presumes pathology and has thus disempowered those it presumes to help, Smith observes that language matters. He summarises key issues around the use of pathologising language and suggests alternative, non-pathologising terms.