Van storend gedrag tot stoornis: De (bio)medicalisering van gedragsproblemen van Nederlandse kinderen en jongeren 1950-1990

In recent decades in the West, the number of diagnoses of mental illness in children and adolescents has increased considerably. A possible explanation is that disease categories have widened, indicating an increasing medicalization of problem behavior, for which a medical solution is required. Since the 1980s, moreover, a process of biomedicalization manifests itself in which the cause of behavioral problems is more often found in the brain (nature) and psychopharmaceuticals are preferred as remedy. At the same time, the idea that problems are caused by the environment (nurture) has lost importance. This PhD focuses on the changes in the expert discourse of Dutch child psychiatrists, child psychologists and special- needs educationalists on the nature, causes and treatment of behavioral problems of children and adolescents from the 1950s up to 1990. Special attention is paid to the balance between nature and nurture in the debate on the most frequently discussed problems.

The research shows that autism, hyperactivity and concentration problems and bedwetting were medicalized as early as 1950. With the adoption of the medical classifications of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in the 1980s, professionals started to also conceive of anxiety and aggression as mental disorders. As regards autism, bedwetting, aggression and anxiety, we see a shift from nurture to nature in the etiology and preferred therapy. The degree to which and the rate at which these changes occurred differs between the problems discussed. Nature and nurture turn out to not mutually exclude each other.