The Social Construction of Illness And Health: Control of Health And Body

Social constructionism is an approach that emphasizes human consciousness and argues that human beings reach their own consciousness through social interaction with the external environment. This approach developed by Berger and Luckmann tried to overcome the dichotomy of structure and agent and focused on human actions. The concepts of illness and health are social constructions as well as medical phenomena. Illness and the experience of illness, pain and the experience of pain are different from each other. It would be a one-dimensional approach to analyze the disease by detaching it from its social context. Since the 1970s, the number of studies drawing attention to the social context of health and illness has increased. Thinkers such as Foucault, who was critical of the institution of health, argued that health is increasingly part of the aim of controlling society. With the medicalization of life, medicine has encircled human life and has become a part of strategies to control the human body. The aim of this article is to focus on the concepts of illness, health, medicine and body in the context of social constructionism, a sociological approach that focuses on the world of meaning of human beings, and to deconstruct medical knowledge.