It is widely accepted today that the modern concept of citizenship has become defined as biological or biomedical citizenship. Current perspectives on the practices of health and illness underestimate the effects of two increasing trends, hyperspecialization and universalization, which combine into a process of virtualizing biomedical practice and research toward the production of practitioners, patients, and medical concepts of normalcy and pathology that fit in with the demands of an information- and knowledge-based economic regime. The process has led to the emergence of the ideal type of the virtual patient. As a virtual patient, a suffering individual is reduced to a bureaucratically manageable case file. I suggest that we need to provide a conceptual framework that can account for the developments in biomedical and mental health research and enable patients, doctors, and caregivers to cooperate in favor of the individual patient’s health, autonomy in his/her decision, and his/her positive development of life-course—understood to be the modern meanings of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in matters of health care.

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