ArticleSociology of health & illness2019
Medicalisation, pharmaceuticalisation, or both? Exploring the medical management of sleeplessness as insomnia.
Article in Sociology of health & illness, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed, 27 citations in OpenAlex.
- Inside the 'Black Box' of Pharmaceuticalisation: NICE, the Permissive Principle and the Case of Anticoagulants.Sociology of health & illness · 2026Article
- Pharmacological Practices Among Chilean University Students: Between Emotional Mediations, Performance Demands, and Health Mandates.Sociology of health & illness · 2026Article
- Nurses' attitudes, beliefs and knowledge of sleep health in residential aged care: An integrative literature review.Journal of advanced nursing · 2025Review
- GPs' reflections on prescribing addictive hypnotics to older people: a qualitative study.BJGP open · 2024Article
- Chronic Insomnia Disorder across Europe: Expert Opinion on Challenges and Opportunities to Improve Care.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Review
- Quantified Sleep: Self-Tracking Technologies and the Reshaping of 21Historische Sozialforschung = Historical social research · 2023Article
- Mapping the insomnia patient journey in Europe and Canada.Frontiers in public health · 2023Article
- The pharmaceuticalisation of life? A fictional case report of insomnia with a thought experiment.Philosophy, ethics, and humanities in medicine : PEHM · 2021Article
- Communicative and Discursive Perspectives on the Medication Experience.Pharmacy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- The Disparate Approaches of General Practitioners to the Pharmaceuticalisation of Cardiovascular Disease Prevention.Frontiers in sociology · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In this paper we examine the medical management of sleeplessness as 'insomnia', through the eyes of general practitioners (GPs) and sleep experts in Britain. Three key themes were evident in the data. These related to (i) institutional issues around advocacy and training in sleep medicine (ii) conceptual issues in the diagnosis of insomnia (iii) and how these played out in terms of treatment issues. As a result, the bulk of medical management occurred at the primary rather than secondary care level. These issues are then reflected on in terms of the light they shed on relations between the medicalisation and the pharmaceuticalisation of sleeplessness as insomnia. Sleeplessness, we suggest, is only partially and problematically medicalised as insomnia to date at the conceptual, institutional and interactional levels owing to the foregoing factors. Much of this moreover, on closer inspection, is arguably better captured through recourse to pharmaceuticalisation, including countervailing moves and downward regulatory pressures which suggest a possible degree of depharmaceuticalisation in future, at least as far prescription hypnotics are concerned. Pharmaceuticalisation therefore, we conclude, has distinct analytical value in directing our attention, in this particular case, to important dynamics occurring within if not beyond the medicalisation of sleeplessness as insomnia.
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