Medicalization of children and adolescents: the widespread view on psychological and educational academical periodics in 2013-2015

• Grant number: 16/11909-8
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: January 01, 2017
• End date: December 31, 2017
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Psychology - Human Development Psychology
• Principal Investigator: Cláudia Aparecida Valderramas Gomes
• Grantee: Elisa Gouvêa
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências e Letras (FCL-ASSIS). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Assis. Assis , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Medicalization consists in a displacement process of everyday problems to the medical field. This infers on simplifying issues of social, political, economical and cultural orders, reducing people to their individualities, and life to biological factors. The aim of this project is to focus on medicalization occurring in education area, which greatest example is the compulsion of pathologizing children with learning and/or behavior disabilities, which end up being identified as having Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). The difficulty to understand and deal with issues of this order triggers a simplistic and hygienist tendency to medicalize children and adolescents considered "non-standard". As a result of this process and the way that it's negatively affecting the formation of children's and adolescents' subjectivity in school age, we intent to identify, by the analyses of periodicals with A1, A2 and B qualification, on the platform CAPES (Personal Development Sector for Higher Education), how the medicalization issue is being refered on national periodicals from psychological and educational areas in 2013-2015, fundamentally on what concerns to the supremacy, or not, of a critical positioning with regarding to such phenomenon. (AU)