Medicalization and Psychologization in scientific and public discourses - The perception of poverty, unemployment and childhood development

In this dissertation, I examine processes of medicalization and psychologization in different discourses. Medicine and psychology have played a substantial role in describing social conditions, which is true in a variety of contexts. From sci- entific discourses, in which knowledge is generated and discussed to public dis- courses like mass media or political debates. A central concern of this disserta- tion is the mechanism by which such processes occur, and which actors are in- volved. For the scientific discourse, I analyzed which disciplines are leading in the international research on poverty in the Web of Science (WoS) between 1956-2017 and which changes in content are thus evident over time. In the (mass) media discourse based on different daily and weekly newspapers in Ger- many, I examined how the reporting of the last 25 years on unemployment and childhood is shaped and whether these two areas are more strongly linked to medical and psychological issues. In a further contribution, I focused on the COVID-19 pandemic. Since external influences may also cause medicalization and psychologization tendencies to emerge, I analyzed to what extent school closures in Germany have been a driver for an increased interest in mental health among children and adolescents. Here I was able to show that this was indeed the case and that, in addition to the purely epidemiological aspects of the pan- demic, threats to mental health as a side effect of the non-pharmaceutical measures became more prominent. Overall, I show that processes of medicalization and psychologization are traceable in various discourses through different actors and that external influ- ences like the COVID-19 pandemic can play a significant role.