The Changing Discourse of Healthism: A Contextual Analysis

This article uses bibliometric and thematic analyses to explore the origins and influence of Crawford's 1980 paper on healthism and the medicalisation of everyday life. The construct of healthism was built on some important concepts such as medical dominance/power, medicalisation, alternative medicines, lifestyles and health behaviour that had only first emerged during the previous decade. In the new millennium, however, healthism has become more associated with new ideas such as appearance and neoliberalism and with wider debates about self-responsibility. This shift in context was also found in the patterning of citations to the paper. After an initial slow accumulation of citations, the number grew rapidly from about 2005. With increasing involvement of patients in their own care management (especially for long-term conditions) and the promotion of more shared decision-making in clinical encounters, the role of self-responsibility in the healthism literature increasingly reflects the emergence of a 'subjectified' individual.