CO-OPTING “MEDICALIZATION”

The right has appropriated many words previously associated with the left. Those include “elites,” “experts,” “empowerment,” “resistance,” and “freedom,” especially “freedom of speech.” We should add “medicalization” to the list. Once a word progressive sociologists, anthropologists, and historians used to critique medicine’s growing authority over daily life, “medicalization” now serves to advance Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s dangerous agenda.

Peter Conrad, one of the first sociologist to use the term and one of the most prolific writers in the field, states that medicalization occurs when a non-medical phenomenon “is defined in medical terms, described using medical language, understood through the adoption of a medical framework, or ‘treated’ with medical intervention.” Kennedy appears to use “medicalization” synonymously with “over-medicalization”; he gives no indication that he considers any type of medicalization benign.

The MAHA Report: Make Our Children Healthy Again, which Kennedy released in September 2025, includes a chapter titled “The Overmedicalization of Our Kids.” Misinformation about vaccines, of course fills the report, but it devotes considerable space to the “overdiagnosis and overtreatment” of children’s mental health problems.

In 1975, exactly fifty years earlier, Conrad published “The Discovery of Hyperkineses: Notes on the Medicalization of Deviant Behavior,” in the journal Social Problems. (“Hyperkineses” is the condition now known as ADHD.) Comparing the MAHA report and Conrad’s article provides insight into the shifting meanings of medicalization that have occurred during the past half century.

The two publications have certain similarities. Although ADHD is not the sole focus of the MAHA report, it singles out that disorder for special attention, noting that recent studies demonstrate that ADHD “has the strongest evidence of overdiagnosis” and that prescriptions for ADHD drugs “doubled between 2006 and 2016.” Both publications also blame the pharmaceutical industry for its role in converting common behaviors into symptoms of a previously unrecognized disease. Conrad writes that after the Federal Drug Administration approved the drug Ritalin for children in 1961, it became the “treatment of choice” for those with hyperkineses. Advertisements in medical journal and direct mailings to physicians encouraged them to diagnose children with the condition and prescribe Ritalin and other stimulant medications. In the past half-century, pharmaceutical marketing has become far more aggressive. The MAHA report marshals considerable evidence to demonstrate that the interests of the pharmaceutical industry “dominate and distort scientific literature, legislative actions, academic institutions, regulatory agencies, medical journal, physician organizations, clinical guidelines and the mass media.” The report also notes the “undue influence” of “direct to consumer” advertising, which is legal only in the United States and New Zealand.

But there also are striking differences between the MAHA report and Conrad’s article. Conrad uses the example of hyperkineses to explore two of the most serious consequences of medicalization—the “individualization of social problems” and the “social control of deviance.” Conrad explains the first issue this way: “We tend to look for causes and solutions to complex social problems in the individual rather than in the social system.” In terms of hyperkineses, that frame “diverts our attention from the family or school and from seriously entertaining the idea that the ‘problem’ could be in the structure of the social system.” Sociologists who explore the second issue define deviance as beliefs and behaviors that diverge from the dominant society’s norms and social control as the way society ensures conformity to those norms.

Those concepts have no place in the MAHA report. Stigmatizing immigrants, poor people, members of racially marginalized groups, and individuals who identify as LGBTQ+ as deviant, the Trump administration seeks to impose white, Christian, nationalist norms and values on society. The regime also views social problems as individual ones. Placing the sole responsibility for health on individuals, RFK, Jr. “blames the victim” when illness arises. He also champions the wellness industry, which gives primacy to life style choices. The MAHA report briefly acknowledges the social determinants of health: “Children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are two to three times more likely to develop mental health issues.” That one sentence, however, receives no elaboration, despite the vast research literature devoted to the topic. Scrupulously avoiding the term “public health,” the MAHA report also notes the importance of considering “population health.” The major citation is the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s controversial 2024 book The Anxious Generation. Ignoring the many causes of children’s mental health issues, the book focuses exclusively on the rise of social media.

Finally, although Conrad focuses on the negative consequences of the rise of medical authority, he does not address the risks of specific treatments. He mentions Ritalin but is silent about the medication’s side effects. By contrast, the MAHA report explores the dangers not only of drugs but also of psychotherapy, arguing that “universal school-based health programs can inadvertently increase distress in certain adolescents by encouraging rumination.” (In 2024, those programs served nearly one fifth of US public school students.) Here the report relies heavily on another 2024 book, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up, by the former Wall Street Journal columnist Abigail Shrier, which asserts that therapy may “weaken resilience by pathologizing normal emotions.” That book, too, has been widely criticized.

Viewing most mental-health treatments for children as more harmful than beneficial, the report ignores the issue of access. Even before Trump returned to the White House, parents faced formidable barriers when they tried to get diagnoses and treatments for their children with mental illness. A 2023 study found that more than half of all parents “perceived obtaining mental health services for their children to be somewhat difficult, very difficult, or impossible.” That year the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry stated that “the gap between demand for [children’s mental health services] and the ability to meet this need is now staggering.” According to a survey conducted by the nonprofit news source KFF on racism, discrimination, and health released in 2024, nearly a third (32 percent) of white parents responded that their children had received mental health services in the past three years, compared to 23 percent of Latinos, 20 percent of African American parents, and 14 percent of Asian.

Since Trump’s second inauguration, his administration has gutted most federally funded mental health services, including those for children. It has dismantled the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the Department of Education, and its School-Based Mental Health Services Grant Program. The Big, Ugly, Budget Bill’s drastic cuts to Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and the Affordable Care Act as well as Congress’s refusal to extend ACA subsidies further restrict children’s access to mental as well as physical health care. The regime has specifically targeted youth identifying as LGBTQ+. Those who call the government’s 988 Suicide and Crisis Hotline no longer can expect to be connected to counselors trained to support them. The administration also seeks to bar Medical and Medicare funding to hospitals that provide gender affirming care to minors.

No longer a word highlighting the negative effects of medical control, “medicalization” now serves to justify the regime’s evisceration of public health.

Sources:

The MAHA Report: Make Our Children Healthy Again, September 2015, https://www.hhs.gov/press-room/maha-commission-report-childhood-disease-strategy.html.

Peter Conrad, “The Discovery of Hyperkinesis: Notes on the Medicalization of Deviant Behavior,” Social Problems, 23, no. 1 (October 1975): 12-21.

Peter Conrad, The Medicalization of Society: On the Transformation of Human Conditions into Treatable Disorders (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).

Abigail Shrier, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing up (Sentinel, 2024).

Leonard Sax, “Is ‘Bad Therapy’ Bad Therapy? A review of Abigail Shrier’s new book,” Psychology Today, April 9, 2024.

Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (Penguin Press, 2024).

Tracy Dennis-Tiwary, “Coddling Plus Devices? Unequivocal Disaster for Our Kids: In ‘The Anxious Generation,’ Jonathan Haidt Says We’re Failing Children—and Takes a Firm Stand against Tech,” New York Times, March 26, 2024.

Shannon Schumacher, Liz Hamel, Samantha Artiga, and Drishti Pillai, “Well-being of Children and Parents: Highlights from the KFF Survey on Racism, Discrimination, and Health, https://www.kff.org/racial-equity-and-health-policy/well-being-of-children-and-parents-highlights-from-the-kff-survey-on-racism-discrimination-and-health/

O. Rose Broderick and Lev Facher, “Trump Cuts Have Decimated the Federal Addiction and Mental Health Agency, Statnews, October 30, 2025.

American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, “Policy Statement on Behavioral Healthcare Workforce Shortage,” 2023, https://www.aacap.org/AACAP/Policy_Statements/Home.aspx.

Nirmita Panchal, Cynthia Cox, and Robin Rudowitz, “The Landscape of School-Based Mental Health Services,” September 11, 2025, www.kff.org.

Paula M. Lantz, Daniel S. Goldberg, and Sarah E. Gollust, “The Perils of Medicalization for Population Health and Health Equity,” Milbank Quarterly, 10, no. S1 (2023): 61-82.

Emily K. Abel is Professor Emerita at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. Her most recent book is Gluten Free for Life: Celiac Disease, Medical Recognition, and the Food Industry.