Abstract:

With the development of biomedicine, mental disorder has come to the era of drug treatment. Drug therapy in the attempt to relieve human mental suffering also leads to the medicinalization of mental disorder. On the one hand, the use of psychotropic drugs solidifies the idea that mental disorder results from brain chemical imbalance, which directly or indirectly affects the path of psychiatric research and the intervention in human mental disorder, and the use of drugs has become one of the tools of clinical diagnosis of mental disorder; on the other hand, for patients and the public, drug use shapes their understandings of mental disorder, regarding mental suffering as physical suffering in a daily life. In the medicinalization of mental disorder, human mental abnormalities are placed under the framework of biomedicine, and human beings are reduced to fully biological beings. While the use of drugs can alleviate the symptoms of mental disorder, it also disciplines the perception and understanding of mental suffering and limits the development of psychiatric medicine and other possibilities for recognizing and intervening in human mental disorder.

Key words: biomedicine, mental disorder, medicinalization, brain, chemical imbalance