The medicalization of deviance has its pros and cons like many other social issues, however when it reaches children believe it is taken too far. Kids will be kids; they will act out and behave in their own unique ways. At times these behaviors and a child’s personality can be difficult to deal with and may considered deviant. But aren’t kids expected to be deviant at times?
Medicating children is a new phenomenon in society. Even when I was a kid, kids that acted out or did not conform were not sent to be tested for ADD/ADHD or Bipolar disorder, they were given detention. Medicating children is all about keeping them conformed within a social institution such as school. They are medicated to make them conform and easier to deal with.
The video here discusses this issue of over-medication within the population of foster children. The opening line explains why children are over-medicated in general, “possibly just because adults and doctors don’t know what else to do with them.” This just may be the sad truth of today’s society. Foster kids are medicated 13 times more than other kids. It is understandable that a foster child has gone through many ordeals, however the solution to a sad child is not to label a diagnosis and prescribe anti-psychotic drugs.
As the video in class showed, sometimes a child really does have one of these disorders, however it is not as common for a child to be bipolar or have ADD/ADHD (a fairly new and too common of a diagnosis) as the amount of children that are on medication shows. Many of these children are medicated to conform, not because they truly have a kind of disorder.
