Diagnoses in and out of time: historical and medical perspectives on the diagnoses of distress
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Petteri Pietikainen
und
Jari Turunen
Abstract
Focusing on the medical approach to the subjective forms of distress, this article has a three-fold argument. First, the historical starting point of diagnosing distress was neurasthenia during the last two decades of the 19th century. Second, the diagnosis of neurasthenia that initially contained more somatic than mental symptoms was gradually replaced by the more psychologically conceptualized neuroses. Such a psychiatrization of neurosis gradually separated mental and somatic syndromes into two distinct diagnostic categories, those of mental and somatic. Third, when modern “neuroses” are seen in the framework of distress rather than disease, it provides tools for new kinds of interventions, in which the principal aim is to alleviate the subjective distress with all possible and reasonable means and methods. As the social context constitutes a crucial “etiology” to medicalized forms of distress, we need new, context-based approaches to both analyze and alleviate such distress. In our historical and medical approach to these “diagnoses of distress”, we are guided by the belief that analyzing diagnostic categories can provide important insight into the mechanisms behind our changing conceptions of health and wellbeing.
Author contributions: All the authors have accepted responsibility for the entire content of this submitted manuscript and approved submission.
Research funding: None declared.
Employment or leadership: None declared.
Honorarium: None declared.
Competing interests: The funding organization(s) played no role in the study design; in the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data; in the writing of the report; or in the decision to submit the report for publication.
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©2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Exploring the iceberg of inappropriateness in hemostasis testing
- Review
- Diagnoses in and out of time: historical and medical perspectives on the diagnoses of distress
- Mini Review
- Five things to know about diagnostic error
- Opinion Paper
- The scientific nature of diagnosis
- Original Articles
- An assessment of overutilization and underutilization of laboratory tests by expert physicians in the evaluation of patients for bleeding and thrombotic disorders in clinical context and in real time
- Misdiagnosis of cerebellar hemorrhage – features of ‘pseudo-gastroenteritis’ clinical presentations to the ED and primary care
- The kinetics of haemoglobin and ferritin in longitudinal community patients with iron deficiency or hypoxia
- Which of low-density lipoprotein cholesterol estimates can be used in children with type 1 diabetes?
- Case Report
- Aseptic myonecrosis following intramuscular benzathine penicllin G injection: a novel syndrome
- Congress Abstracts
- Diagnostic Error in Medicine
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Exploring the iceberg of inappropriateness in hemostasis testing
- Review
- Diagnoses in and out of time: historical and medical perspectives on the diagnoses of distress
- Mini Review
- Five things to know about diagnostic error
- Opinion Paper
- The scientific nature of diagnosis
- Original Articles
- An assessment of overutilization and underutilization of laboratory tests by expert physicians in the evaluation of patients for bleeding and thrombotic disorders in clinical context and in real time
- Misdiagnosis of cerebellar hemorrhage – features of ‘pseudo-gastroenteritis’ clinical presentations to the ED and primary care
- The kinetics of haemoglobin and ferritin in longitudinal community patients with iron deficiency or hypoxia
- Which of low-density lipoprotein cholesterol estimates can be used in children with type 1 diabetes?
- Case Report
- Aseptic myonecrosis following intramuscular benzathine penicllin G injection: a novel syndrome
- Congress Abstracts
- Diagnostic Error in Medicine
