Medicalização da adolescência e abuso de psicofármacos: controle social, racionalidade tecnológica e a crise do laço social na sociedade administrada

Abstract

This study aims to critically analyse the phenomenon of psychotropic drug abuse among adolescents in contemporary society from an interdisciplinary perspective combining Critical Theory and Psychoanalysis. The research problematizes the medicalization of adolescence, understood as a mechanism of social control sustained by technological rationality and justified by techno-scientific discourse. In this administered society that determines narratives, controls perceptions, and shapes behaviours, medicalization emerges as a dominant social symptom, revealing the system's inability to provide symbolic spaces for processing anguish while imposing a mode of jouissance that silences the emerging subject and obstructs desire. The increasing use and abuse of psychotropic drugs among youth demonstrates how technology's promises of efficiency have generated destructive and irrational effects on society and intersubjective relationships. This scenario exposes profound transformations in social bonds, which in turn influence the subject formation and the production of subjectivities. Addictions, self-harm, acting-out behaviours, suicide attempts, and other manifestations are interpreted as responses to this violence and to the difficulty in symbolizing the intense affects emerging from puberty - affects that psychiatry insists on classifying through diagnostic categories. The study concludes that the true crisis lies not in adolescents, but in a social order that prefers the technical management of jouissance over the ethical risk of desire.