Neoliberalism and Psychic Suffering: The Psychiatrisation of School Suffering

Abstract

Neoliberalism is a space of production of subjectivity whose axis is the notion of human capital. Considering that, for the neoliberal discourse, the construction of this human capital must begin in early childhood, we show that, in this context, education is understood as an investment destined to hierarchize and value this capital. Starting from the works of Dardot and Laval, we propose to study the effective impact that this neoliberal way of understanding education has in the school environment, underlining its link with the proliferation of psychiatric diagnoses in childhood. Finally, we analyze how this process of psychiatrisation of psychic suffering, and of erasing social factors and conflicts, impacts on the mental health of children when they fail in the educational process.

Keywords

• psychic suffering
• human capital
• education
• psychiatrization
• childhood