Psychopathologization and medicalization of childhood - what can psychoanalysis in the face of the effects of segregation?

Abstract

The psychopathologization and medicalization of childhood is presented in the contemporaneity in an epidemic character of national and international proportions. It has become a public health issue, in which children are taken as objects of evaluation and medical-psychiatric interventions, acting mainly in the regulation of their behaviors and bodies, depriving them of the position of subjects. It is irrefutable that there are expanding market niches with diagnostic and therapeutic proposals, which legitimize themselves as true sciences, evidence-based. The other knowledge, such as psychoanalysis, is now called pseudosciences. Mental health is a big business in which for each new disorder, there are new medications and treatments. In this context, what could psychoanalysis in the face of the effects of segregation resulting from the alliance between the discourse of capitalism and science? What place for the analyst's discourse in the city of discourses, which produce closed groups, new identities for these subjects? The analyst would have to adopt an orthopedic position, serving the ideology of the happy and functional child, or uphold the ethics of the the unconscious subject's desire, not retreating ahead the child who uses his/her symptoms as a means of preserving his/her singularity, continually threatened by the ideals of normality.