Medicalization of childhood: between care and medication

Cadernos Brasileiros de Terapia Ocupacional

The objective of this study was to discuss and reflect on Psychosocial Care for children and adolescents, as well as to point out the impasses and the main challenges in this field today. This is a reflexive essay, based on the analysis of institutional documents and notes from the scientific literature that support the theoretical contribution of Psychosocial Care and the historical path of transformations in child and adolescent mental health care in Brazil. It was possible to elucidate aspects related to the field of psychosocial care in general and child and adolescent mental health in particular, and to discuss them in order to advance in the debates regarding the supply and structure of care in the Sistema Único de Saúde. It could be possible to construct critical analyzes, producing theoretical subsidies for later studies, besides enabling the strengthening of this field for the children and adolescents.

2020

This paper is an extract from the thesis "Policies of the encounter and the wild forces in child and young people care" held at the PostGraduate Program in Psychology of UNESP-Assis. It is a narrative of a story presented through issues pertinent to the psychosocial care clinic with children and young people. The composition of this story had the challenge of diverting from the narrative of unique stories, from the reproduction of only a majority place to allow new perspectives. It was named as the complexity of forces, crossings, and events present in the situations of clinical practices, which give visibility to the different ways of building rapprochement, relationship, and care. This text shows the history of Violeta, a child with autism. Throughout the writing, questions about working with groups in the CAPSij, the corporeity of children and adults, and the strategies of production of the common are highlighted. Such questions are strengthened by the composition with authors such as Deleuze and Guattari, Fernand Deligny, Lapoujade, and Lepecki. It was concluded that betting on the bodies' ability to enter into connection or access primordial communism, by challenging adult-centeredness, maybe strategies triggered in the childhood clinic.

Temas em Psicologia, 2017

The comprehension of the parents' relation with their child's psychotherapy has developed considerably since the beginning of child psychoanalysis, elevating the importance of active participation of family into the patient's treatment, as also the attention of the therapist to unconscious phenomena that occur in this context. This issue refers to a narrative revision of psychoanalytical literature about presence of parents in child psychotherapy, which objective refers to analyze the way contemporaneous authors who work with psychoanalytical perspective understand the parents' role in child psychotherapy. Initially, were consulted books of classic authors in psychoanalysis, and a specifi c book of more contemporaneous authors about the matter of the parents' role in child psychotherapy. Articles about the same theme were then searched into the scientifi c electronic basis SciELO (Scientifi c Electronic Library Online), PePsic (portal of Electronic Psychology Journals) and LILACS (Latin American and Caribbean Health Sciences Literature). Were selected for analysis 19 articles published at online papers. It was verifi ed that the texts approached specially the position of analyst/psychotherapist and the relations established with the patient's parents, being emphasized, mainly, the necessity of receiving the parents' anguishes and their transference directed to the therapist, creating an space of continence, refl ection and ressignifi cance of the child's problem.

The Psychological Duty: an experience in psychoanalytic practice (Atena Editora), 2021

The article presents a data collection, from the reports of the psychological shift of the school clinic; between the semester of 2017/02 to 2019/02; 160 hours; 130 patients; 251 calls; the result shows that the demands were: mood disorders; neurotic, stress-related and somatoform disorders; personality and behavioral disorders; emotional and behavioral disorders that usually start in childhood and adolescence; in addition to a small incidence of other disorders. The discussion runs through the theory of Freud to Lacan, addressing important points: free association; the anguish experienced by the patients; preliminary interviews and diagnoses; and the unconscious and the symptoms. It is divided into three parts: what is the duty; what happened on duty; and supervision. Finally, it shows the possibility of using psychoanalytic tools outside the usual practice model in Freud’s time, bringing a contribution to academic training.

British Journal of Psychotherapy, 2012

Reading this book was a rather humbling experience in that I realized that there is so much more research on the impact of early life trauma than I knew, even though I was familiar with quite a number of seminal papers in the field. One of the remarkable aspects of the book is the range of research that it covers, from the epidemiology of childhood trauma and the history of professional attitudes to the problem, through diagnostic controversies, psychosocial issues, longitudinal studies on the immediate and long-term neurobiological, psychological and physical effects of early relational trauma, to the implications all these hold for clinical work with children and adults who have suffered early-life trauma. This huge body of research is discussed and summarized in three sections, each of which has short co-authored chapters, so that the expertise of key researchers and clinicians across the whole field of traumatology is represented. The editors of the book are three psychiatrists, Ruth Lanius and Claire Pain from Canada, and Eric Vermetten from the Netherlands, all neuroscience and trauma research specialists who also explore the implications of empirical research for clinical psychotherapy practice. The focus of almost all these papers is on the hugely damaging impact that neglect or abuse by primary caregivers has on the psychological and emotional development of the human infant, creating lifelong consequences in terms of brain development, attachment and affect dysregulation, altered stress responses and a range of psychological symptoms, from the flashbacks and hyper-arousal of PTSD to altered perception, epileptic-type phenomena and dissociative states of varying degrees of severity, including borderline personality and dissociative identity disorder. This evidence from neurobiology powerfully supports the argument that it is real-life experience rather than innate unconscious phantasy that determines most of the problems our patients bring to the consulting room and so is highly relevant to our clinical practice. In Section I, the epidemiology and history of childhood trauma are first described, with several authors commenting on the reluctance of some professional groups to accept the link between childhood trauma and a range of physical and psychological symptoms they see in their patients. In the synopsis to this section, McFarlane suggests that: 'Clinicians' capacities for observation and description of patients' predicaments are more determined by the models of psychopathology that clinicians adhere to than the history presented to them by the patient' (p. 44). McFarlane suggests that psychoanalytic theory carries considerable responsibility for 'the millions of patients whose stories were told but not believed, being dismissed as oedipal fantasies' (p. 44). But medicine, psychology and psychiatry also failed to recognize the destructiveness of childhood abuse, as part of a broader denial of the significance of trauma. Van der Kolk highlights the shocking example of one psychiatric textbook, published in the 1970s that actually extolled 'the possible benefits to a child of incest' (p. 58).

Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 1973

cadernos brasileiros de terapia ocupacional, 2020

This paper is an extract from the thesis “Policies of the encounter and the wild forces in child and young people care” held at the Post-Graduate Program in Psychology of UNESP-Assis. It is a narrative of a story presented through issues pertinent to the psychosocial care clinic with children and young people. The composition of this story had the challenge of diverting from the narrative of unique stories, from the reproduction of only a majority place to allow new perspectives. It was named as the complexity of forces, crossings, and events present in the situations of clinical practices, which give visibility to the different ways of building rapprochement, relationship, and care. This text shows the history of Violeta, a child with autism. Throughout the writing, questions about working with groups in the CAPSij, the corporeity of children and adults, and the strategies of production of the common are highlighted. Such questions are strengthened by the composition with authors such as Deleuze and Guattari, Fernand Deligny, Lapoujade, and Lepecki. It was concluded that betting on the bodies' ability to enter into connection or access primordial communism, by challenging adult-centeredness, maybe strategies triggered in the childhood clinic.

2012

This paper presents an analysis of the concept of parenthood based on the psychoanalytical perspective, which allows the study of both the subjectivity of parents and children. The hypothesis is that parenthood, characteristically infiltrated by the narcissism of parents themselves, can be a source of tension. Based on this premise, it is possible to understand certain responses in the development of a child's ego and which signals success to a greater or lesser extent in the passage from the principle of pleasure to the principle of reality. We also stress the importance of studying effects of this narcissist infiltration of parental love on the subjectivity of parents. This study contributes both to investigations addressing psychoneurosis, based on a comparison provided between clinical practice and psychoanalytical theory, and to the investigation of more complex social phenomena such as violence and the disaggregation of human communities.

Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 2020

Psicologia em Estudo, 2019

This study aimed to review the Brazilian scientific production on medicalization in the field of education. A systematic search was carried out in the Brazilian literature with the keywords pathologization of life, medicalization of education, learning, teaching and childhood. In all, 40 articles published between 2010 and 2016, indexed in the Scientific Electronic Library Online - SciELO, were selected for analysis. The information was analyzed based on the thematic content analysis proposed by Bardin. The results showed a diversity of understandings about the concept of medicalization. Some articles reported the occurrence of educational practices that produce suffering and the individualization of school complaints, evidencing a disagreement between the production of literature and the daily routine of schools. There has been also a significant increase in diagnoses of ADHD and drug therapies in the treatment of school complaints, thus expanding the pharmaceutical industry by conceiving children as potential consumers of medication. Finally, new studies are indicated to broaden the sources of research, incorporating also theses and dissertations. It is also recommended the realization of research with children, relatives, and the school community so as to analyze the impact of medicalization on the subjectivity and performance of students.