MEDICALIZATION AND PATHOLOGIZATION OF LIFE: CHILDHOODS’ SITUATION IN LATIN AMERICA

Abstract

This paper is part of a joint work that we have been carrying out within the Forum Infancias (Childhoods Forum), in Argentina, Fórum sobre Medicalização da Educação e da Sociedade (Forum on Medicalization of Life and Education), in Brazil, and other organizations concerned with the increase in last years of the patologization and medicalization of life, specially concerning childhood, since we consider it as one of the most vulnerable periods in one’s life. A report will be made approaching different countries of Latin America, their different laws, decrees and projects that promote effects that can pathologize people’s life. A clinical excerpt will be included, in order to exemplify the issue under analysis. We understand that learning and behavior problems whose prevalence grows increasingly in childhood must be understood as a product of a society that promotes increasingly competitive lifestyles, productivist and directed towards consumption rather than as individual issues of biological origins.

http://dx.doi.org/10.14572/nuances.v25i1.2743