Banca de QUALIFICAÇÃO: LUIZA PESSIN

THE ENROLLMENT OF CHILDREN ON THEIR MEDICATION PROCESS 

Medicalization. Childhood. Pathologization and Psychopharmaceuticals. Search with children.

The present study aims to analyze the enunciations of children in the process of medicalization, particularly, on these effects in their daily lives. The study to be carried out seeks to problematize the growing medicalization of childhood and the pathologization of the ways of being a child nowadays, since from a critical point of view the 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 everyday behaviors and other spheres to medical jurisdiction. The classificatory and pathological discourses create medicalizantes therapies, besides multiplying the use of psychotropic drugs, seem to be committed with the correction of the abnormalities, turning, therefore, into disciplinary strategies of normalization of the conducts considered deviant. To do so, we will discuss the unfolding of the concept of medicalization and the history of medicine and child psychiatry, asking how medical-psychiatric knowledge was responding, through its disciplinary devices, to the social demands addressed to it. Psychoanalysis contributes as a tool to understand the malaise that infancy introduces in the social project and what medicine can conceal. Although there are many studies on medicalization of children in Brazil in the last years, there is a shortage of works that include children as research subjects. We will adopt as strategy for the production of the empirical material the realization of individual semi-structured interviews with children up to 12 years of age who seek psychological care in an outpatient institution in the city of Rio de Janeiro.