Coveney_et_al-2019-Sociology_of_Health_&_Illness.pdf (157.27 kB)
Medicalisation, pharmaceuticalisation, or both? Exploring the medical management of sleeplessness as insomnia
journal contribution
posted on 2018-10-17, 12:55 authored by Katie CoveneyKatie Coveney, Simon J. Williams, Jonathan GabeIn this paper we examine the medical management of sleeplessness as ‘insomnia’, through the eyes of general practitioners (GPs) and sleep experts in Britain. Three key themes were evident in the data. These related to (i) institutional issues around advocacy and training in sleep medicine (ii) conceptual issues in the diagnosis of insomnia (iii) and how these played out in terms of treatment issues. As a result, the bulk of medical management occurred at the primary rather than secondary care level. These issues are then reflected on in terms of the light they shed on relations between the medicalisation and the pharmaceuticalisation of sleeplessness as insomnia. Sleeplessness, we suggest, is only partially and problematically medicalised as insomnia to date at the conceptual, institutional and interactional levels owing to the foregoing factors. Much of this moreover, on closer inspection, is arguably better captured through recourse to pharmaceuticalisation, including countervailing moves and downward regulatory pressures which suggest a possible degree of depharmaceuticalisation in future, at least as far prescription hypnotics are concerned. Pharmaceuticalisation therefore, we conclude, has distinct analytical value in directing our attention, in this particular case, to important dynamics occurring within if not beyond the medicalisation of sleeplessness as insomnia.
Funding
This study was funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ES/H028870/1).
History
School
- Social Sciences
Department
- Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies
Published in
Sociology of Health and IllnessCitation
COVENEY, C.M., WILLIAMS, S.J. and GABE, J., 2019. Medicalisation, pharmaceuticalisation, or both? Exploring the medical management of sleeplessness as insomnia. Sociology of Health and Illness, 41(2), pp. 266-284.Publisher
John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Foundation for SHIL © The AuthorsVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/Acceptance date
2018-07-17Publication date
2019Notes
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution andreproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.ISSN
0141-9889eISSN
1467-9566Publisher version
Language
- en