Currently, national and international scenario reveals strong investments in the education field. Despite the expansion of equity and fairness principles, there are a lot of barriers that tend to constrain the quality of children and adolescents’ experiences at school (Macleod, 2010). This paper focuses on one of these obstacles: medicalization.

In spite of the diversity of medicalization definitions and its historical reformulations over the last decades, the term medicalization refers to “a process by which ‘non-medical’ (or ‘life’ or ‘human’) problems become understood and treated as ‘medical’ problems” (Parens, 2013: 28). As Conrad (1992) highlights medicalization consists of defining a problem in medical terms, using medical language to describe it, adopting a medical framework to understand it, or using a medical intervention to ‘treat’ it. In fact this is a process that may or may not involve a medical profession and it is not new (Maturo, 2012).

The medicalization thesis emerged from the work of sociologists of the 1930s to 1950s (K. Davis, W. Mills, T. Parsons) who linked social control to an increasing dominance of medicine over individual and social problems. Irving Zola was one of the first to use the term but it was when Ivan Illich published Medical Nemesis in 1975 and Limits to Medicine in 1976 that ‘the medicalization of life’ thesis came out from academic to popular discourse (Petrina, 2006).

Besides the discourses, the way behaviours are considered problematic and the diagnosis underlying them reflect drugs’ solutions unavoidably results in the assumption that children/adolescents do not fit properly in the institutions in which they move in, particularly school. This perspective tends to reinforce teachers and educational administrators’ beliefs that these children/adolescents’ problems are not their problem but a problem in the students’ brains (Lopes, 2012). Thus we assist to several practices of diagnosing such as dyslexia in children/adolescents with reading difficulties, hyperactivity in other whose behaviours tend to be deviant from the normative and so on. But this phenomenon is not restricted to the school setting. Rather, “educators ought to understand that a process of medicating kids for school is completely interdependent with a complex of psychotherapeutic practices and historical contingences” (Petrina, 2006: 531).

The main consequences of this trend are the individualization of social problems and the depoliticization of health policy (Maturo, 2012). As Kvaale, Haslam & Gottdiener (2013:783) refer “a sense of being different and defective can be internalized, undermining emotional well-being, self-esteem, and hope”. Still, even more than judge good and bad forms of medicalization this paper aims understanding the dynamics it involves, the contexts where it occurs and the agents it implicates. Therefore, the recognition of the intentions which lie behind this phenomenon - without neglecting its enrolment in a sphere that is inevitably political and sociocultural - is the main objective.

Another essential point of this work is to admit the experience at school and, moreover, the life experience of children and adolescents into medicalization processes as a collective issue. Therefore considering not just these children/adolescents and their families, public contexts should be regarded as active partners in the construction of an equal society (Lear, 2007). It is clearly a matter of framing this issue in a rights paradigm that more than emphasizing needs assumes that promoting health and fair living conditions is a responsibility of all. The idea of placing this issue about medicalization in a public dimension refers implicitly to a question of citizenship. Thus, this study highlights the importance of recognizing children and adolescents with their specificities as citizens who should be treated differently so that their needs are met (Stainton, 2005; Barnes, 2007).

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