Contagio social de transtornos mentais: análise das estratégias biopolíticas de medicalização da infância

Identifier:  TDX:2744

Handle: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11797/TDX2744

Authors:  Martinhago, Fernanda

Abstract:
Childhood medicalization is evident in the contemporaneus, due to an epidemic of mental disorders that affects children and adolescents. From this perspective, a part of the child and adolescent public is considered to be undermined by misdiagnosed psychiatric diagnoses and unnecessary treatment. Therefore, the main concern that governs this research is centered in children and adolescents that are being labeled with false positive diagnoses of mental disorders and “treated” with drug interventions as if they had serious pathologies. Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) was chosen as the cross-cutting theme of this study because it has a high prevalence in several countries. From this context, we established as the main objective of this research to analyze how the concept of risk and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) classifications, understood as biopolitical strategies, are featured in social media and articulate the process of childhood medicalization, that pass through fragile microsystems (school, family support groups). The development of this investigation started from a critical-interpretive perspective for data analysis, which was obtained by triangulation of sources and techniques: integrative review, focal groups, interviews, application of open questionnaire and visual ethnography. Research fields include a public school from Florianópolis and two virtual communities on the social network Facebook. We consider that the information about mental disorders disseminated in the social networks, identified as educational, and added to the publicity, characterize a vulnerability of the virtual field. This scenario facilitates the expansion of the consumption horizons, introducing products that meet the cultural created needs (well-being, better performance, higher productivity), thus culturally transforming what was considered normal into pathological. Therefore, a significant part of ADHD diagnoses in children and adolescents can be induced by this process that I call social contagy.