Insomnia, Medicalization, and Expert Knowledge

Author:

Kroker Kenton1

Affiliation:

1. Kenton Kroker – Health & Society Program, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies, York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Abstract

Historians have clearly articulated the ways in which sleeplessness has long been part of the human condition. As an object of medical expertise and public health intervention, however, insomnia is a much more recent invention, having gained its status as a pathology during the 1870s. But while insomnia has attracted considerable and concerted attention from public health authorities allied with sleep medicine specialists, this phenomenon is not well explained by classical medicalization theory, in part because it is the sleepless sufferers, not the medical experts, who typically have the authority to diagnose insomnia. The dynamics of insomnia’s history are better described as those of a boundary object, around which concepts and practices of biomedicine and psychology coalesce to frame contemporary notions of self-medicalization and self-experiment.

Publisher

University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress)

Reference91 articles.

1. For example, see Ka-Fai Chung et al., “Cross-cultural and Comparative Epidemiology of Insomnia: The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), International Classification of Diseases (ICD) and International Classification of Sleep Disorders (ICSD),” Sleep Medicine 16, no. 4 (2015): 477–82.

2. Examples abound. See David Yetman and Thomas Van Devender, Mayo Ethnobotany: Land, History, and Traditional Knowledge in Northwest Mexico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 209

3. and Nancy J. Turner, Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge: Ethnobotany and Ecological Wisdom of Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern North America, vol. 1, The History and Practice of Indigenous Plant Knowledge (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2014), 453.

4. See Kenton Kroker, The Sleep of Others and the Transformations of Sleep Research (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 18–70.

5. Gabriel Garcia Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 37–58.

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