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In the 1970s, the concept of sport addiction appeared in scientific literature, warning of the addictive properties of exercise when taken to extremes. Appearing in over 6500 peer-reviewed articles in Google Scholar from 1979 to 2017, this construct is of interest to the fields of mental health and sport sociology as it provides a heuristic case to consider the conditions which allow for a category-in-the-making to gain meaning despite its absence from leading classification systems. Using Hacking's framework of ecological niches, this review of literature provides a critical examination of “sport addiction” and aims to investigate the driving forces and the means by which social actors from the scientific community negotiate the landscape and boundaries of this emerging disorder. The results highlight the prominence of psychology in the diffusion of the construct and the reticence of the medical world to legitimize it as a mental health category.

Mental health categories can circulate in societies regardless of whether they are recognized by medical professionals. This article asks why some labels are adopted en masse to commonly characterize some forms of distress, while other labels remain confined to specialist spheres. Contrasting with many examples of medicalization, “sex addiction” offers a heuristic case study because it was only after its exclusion from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1994 that it became widely used to pathologize sexual excess in Western cultures. To understand how this and other categories acquire such popularity, it is necessary to account more explicitly for the multiple social appropriations of these categories within various non-medical fields and examine how they circulate between these fields. Drawing on two years of qualitative data collection from North American and Australian social institutions of non-medical therapy, law, the media, and religion, this article proposes a theoretical and methodological framework for studying the “social existence” of mental health categories such as sex addiction.

The purpose of this article is to explore how the social work discipline could provide a complementary lens through which yoga therapy can be analyzed and evaluated by engaging in knowledge-creation practices and procedures that prioritize the “epistemic responsibility” described by philosopher Lorraine Code. More specifically, by seeking to strategically include often-subjugated types of knowledge and by focusing on redistributing epistemic power to agents that typically have been excluded from epistemic participation in contemporary yoga therapy research, the social work discipline, with its strong commitment to social justice, has the potential to contribute to filling an important gap in scientific literature. We begin by presenting the relevance of the social work perspective in relation to the field of yoga therapy. We next offer a reserved critical analysis of the dominant technical knowledge base that currently informs yoga therapy practice. This analysis highlights the social parameters that may be rendered invisible or left aside when adopting a positivist epistemological lens and justifies how the conceptual apparatus of epistemic responsibility serves as a potential platform for rethinking social work's position and future contributions to the field of yoga therapy. Finally, we mobilize the concept of cultural appropriation to illustrate how striving for epistemic responsibility provides an entry point for addressing the multilevel, complex social processes embedded in yoga therapy practice and research while aiming to capture the many voices—and hence the various truths—implicated in a democratic, reflexive, and inclusive research process.

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