A crítica à medicalização infantil: um recorte a partir de produções acadêmicas que privilegiam as narrativas infantis

Abstract

The study to be carried out seeks to problematize the increasing medicalization of childhood and the pathologization of ways of being a child today, because from a critical point of view, increasing medicalization can be seen as a political and cultural process. It starts from the definition of medicalization as a process by which non-medical problems are defined and treated as medical problems, emphasizing the displacement of daily behaviors and other spheres to medical jurisdiction. Classification and pathologizing discourses create medicalizing therapies, besides multiplying the use of psychotropic drugs, seem to be committed to the correction of abnormalities, thus becoming disciplinary strategies of normalisation of conducts considered deviant. To this end, we will address the unfolding of the concept of medicalization and the history of child psychiatry, asking how medical-psychiatric knowledge was responding, through its disciplinary devices, to the social demands addressed to it. We will discuss the medicalization of learning and behaviors of students who do not meet the standard conceived by the school institution and how these supposed disorders are justifying not learning at school. The research conducted a literature review of the national academic production of studies that favor children's narratives as an analysis material, in order to raise the prevalence of critical positioning as well as to analyze, through so-called children, the meanings that children attribute to their medicalization process. These studies have revealed the need for further research with critical ly, who based their reflections on historical and social elements, although we consider their proportionality to the total analyzed research. The research also showed that children's said are crossed by the discourse of contemporary medicalization and, the critical works analyzed made it possible to glimpse other forms of child care both pedagogical and medical different from the recommended by the medicalizing logic namely the individualization and biologization of human problems.