Social construction of illness and disease

Abstract

The meaning of illness varies according to the paradigm and the perspective it approaches. From the positivist paradigm, typical of the field of biomedicine, the disease is conceived from a mechanistic or biologistic point of view so that priority is given to the organic alteration that occurs in the human body, ignoring the subjectivity inherent in this process. We will analyze the social construction of illness through an anthropological perspective, including considerations of the role of society, the conditioning factors and effects observed in this process and the social responses that medicine assumes in this dynamic. In nature, disease does not exist as such but as a biological phenomenon that can only be distinguished because it breaks a specific sequence of events that are part of a continuous process. With the witnessing eye of the human being, this phenomenon makes sense. It is the individual and society that give the label of disease to a particular event. This label is the result of a social construction and, as such, is described in this article from a sociological point of view. Illness is constructed through a doctor-patient bond in which roles and expectations of mutual fulfilment are generated. Medicine is a response of the culture to legitimize the condition of sickness in someone who cannot continue to fulfil his or her usual roles. Some schools consider illness a legitimate deviation as long as it is assumed that the patient is not responsible for his ailment; if responsibility is assumed, the illness is considered an illegitimate deviation with a solid moral pejorative condition.