“Inconvenient people” at school: children and youth’s medicalization and their resistance strategies

Abstract

The article aims to understand the “inconvenient” children and young people’s medicalization process and its effects on their subjectivity and life trajectory. The research was supported by a case study, selected for psychiatric diagnoses based on school complaints, and involved interviews and documentary analysis of medical records and school reports. The results indicated that medicalization is a network that operates through various discourses (medical, pedagogical and family) that reproduce an essentialist conception of childhood and adolescence, based on the notion of "normal development". The various institutionalization and segregation attempts (including attempts to transfer to a disabled school and to a psychiatric hospital) and the construction of the notion of dangerousness throughout the described  life trajectory, show how medicalization can be associated with  life judicialization  at the service of social control of the dissent. The family, seen as "unstructured", reproduces school and health discourses, with little resistance and looks at their children as 'inconvenient” ones, but the trajectory described shows the constant presence of resistance movements on the part of the medicalized youth.