Medicalization to and Fro: Informational Trajectories Around Performance Consumptions

The stretching of the boundaries of medical intervention encompassed not only a growing catalogue of phenomena, but the functional span of that intervention. Expanding from treatment, backwards to prevention, and forward to enhancement, medicalization can be said to have logically paved the way for a commodified management of human performance, which pharmaceuticalization dynamics furthered still. However, ultimately that process also eluded the medical markers of normality that signaled those functional distinctions and, with it, the control of the agents that regulated the legitimate use of therapeutic resources for those purposes. In that sense, a medicalized genealogy of performance management through therapeutic resources does not entail a continued medicalized regulation of that phenomenon. Therefore, that arena constitutes a privileged site to observe to what extent and in what planes is medicalization still a driving and regulatory force in the expansion of a therapeutic plasticity in the management of our lives and bodies. With the professional, institutional and national borders of regulation of the production, distribution and access to therapeutic resources also eroding, this field could potentially represent a social reinvention of the use of therapeutic resources beyond medicalization. To assess whether that is the case, drawing on extensive and qualitative data from a study on youths’ therapeutic consumptions for performance purposes, in Portugal, we will focus on the informational trajectories through which individuals organize those consumption practices. These trajectories will enable us to ascertain: i) to what extent are medical sources present in the social organization of performance consumptions, ii) what new roles they may take on there, given the displacement of their centrality in expanding infoscapes, iii) whether the rationales that govern individuals’ choice and articulation of different sources of information to assess and access these resources may retain and prolong in new ways structural elements of their medicalized genealogy.