pathologize

English

Alternative forms

pathologise

Etymology

Verb

pathologize (third-person singular simple present pathologizes, present participle pathologizing, simple past and past participle pathologized)

(transitive) To characterize as a pathology or disease; to characterize (a person) as suffering from a disease.
Near-synonym: medicalize

Some childhood behavior has been pathologized as attention-deficit disorder.
- 2001 December 16, Melanie Thernstrom, “Pain, the Disease”, in The New York Times, retrieved 12 July 2011:
  Many pain patients have had doctors who pathologized them, told them their pain was unreal.
- 2007 July 23, Rachel Endo, “Inbox”, in Time:
  To pathologize China's industries as corrupt not only reeks of centuries-old Yellow Peril rhetoric but also fails to acknowledge the shortcomings of transnational regulations.
- 2009, Joseph G. Ponterotto et al., Handbook of Multicultural Counseling, →ISBN, page 142:
  My automatic reaction was to deal with the anxiety he evoked in me by pathologizing him as paranoid and obsessive compulsive.
- 2014, Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber, Feminist Research Practice: A Primer, 2nd edition, Los Angeles, C.A. […]: SAGE, →ISBN, page 63:
  Their results showed that cisgenderist language is commonplace in professional communications between psychologists about children who self-defined their gender, that the most pathologizing language is found in literature by mental health professionals, and that those most closely tied to the most prolific author in the field through publication are most likely to use language that pathologizes and misgenders children.

Derived terms

pathologisation, pathologization

Translations

to characterize as a pathology or disease; to characterize (a person) as suffering from a disease

Danish: sygeliggøre
German: pathologisieren (de)
Hungarian: patologizál