Andreas Vilhelmsson completed his PhD in public health focusing on depression, medicalization and public health in 2014. A large part of his research was conducted at the Nordic School of Public Health NHV in Gothenburg. He received his Master of Science in Public Health at Malmö University in 2003. Prior to research studies he worked as a Public Health Officer at the Swedish Institute of Public Health (SNIPH). He has been a teacher in the course in global health at the Medical Faculty of Lund University from 2012 and onwards. Since 2016, he is positioned with the organization of Primary Care, Region Skåne and the Center of knowledge in women’s health and also the Center of knowledge in migration and health. At the moment, he is also Community Editor for the PLOS ECR Blog, an interdisciplinary community for early career researchers in the sciences.

PhD thesis

A pill for the ill? Depression, medicalization and public health

The main findings of the thesis were that patients reporting to an open Internet-based system in Sweden seemed, to a large extent, to experience psychiatric ADR symptoms of mental disturbances (sometimes severe), which affected them in many different ways, especially during discontinuation. These reports also suggested a negative doctor-patient interaction from the patient’s perspective with risks leading to increased medicalization as a result of overdiagnoses of depression and pharmaceuticalization resulting from overprescribed antidepressants. By a theoretical discussion on public health and medicalization, it is agued in the thesis that an increased medicalization as a result of excessive diagnosing risks individualizing mental problems and may divert the focus from the social and political context of public health.