Dos diagnósticos aos manuais: mercado farmacêutico e transtornos mentais da infância em questão

The purpose of the article is to situate the moment of change – both in articles and in research procedures – that marks DSM-III as a way of approaching psychiatric disorders, placing the pharmaceutical industry in the making of new discourses. This is the moment for the reemergence of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and marks the confrontation with the Freudian psychodynamic approach that will be supported by the alternative of tests and statistical procedures. What is the context of these changes? We mobilize authors from economic sociology to think of the drug market as a field of struggle – struggle around the criteria for classifying reality – as well as the dynamics of interaction with the field of health. The article starts from bibliographic research and document analysis. The argument is that the nosology of ADHD, like any other cultural arbitrary, is not neutral and expresses power relations. If several researches point to medical power as biopolitical power, it is possible to see how new arrangements between the pharmaceutical industry and psychiatry expand the scope of the first to reach adolescence and childhood, adding the role of the pharmaceutical industry as biopolitical reinforcement