Desarrollo global del niño: más allá de la suplementación farmacológica con yodo

Iodine deficiency is a factor that may compromise child development, but is not the only one. Other health determinants, some of them outside the healthcare system, are able to influence development. Fighting iodine deficiency may be a pragmatic and useful strategy if it is found to be not maleficent, beneficial to health, and cost-effective, and does not make us lose the notion that child development goes beyond psychomotor or cognitive performance. This article analyzes such constraints from a critical point of view.     

Diagnosing Suicides of Resolve: Psychiatric Practice in Contemporary Japan

In Japan, suicide has long been depicted as an act of free will, even aestheticized in the cultural notion suicide of resolve. Amid the record-high Japanese suicide rates since the 1990s, however, Japanese psychiatrists have been working to medicalize suicide and, in the process, confronting this deeply ingrained cultural notion. Drawing on two years of fieldwork at psychiatric institutions around Tokyo, I examine how psychiatrists try to persuade patients of the pathological nature of their suicidal intentions and how patients respond to such medicalization. I also explore psychiatrists' ambivalent attitudes toward pathologizing suicide and how they limit their biomedical jurisdiction by treating only what they regard as biological anomaly, while carefully avoiding the psychological realm. One ironic consequence of this medicalization may be that psychiatrists are reinforcing the dichotomy between normal and pathological, "pure" and "trivial," suicides, despite their clinical knowledge of the tenuousness of such distinctions and the ephemerality of human intentionality. Thus, while the medicalization of suicide is cultivating a conceptual space for Japanese to debate how to bring the suicidal back onto the side of life, it scarcely seems poised to supplant the cultural discourse on suicide that has elevated suicide to a moral act of self-determination.     

Expectant Israeli Fathers and the Medicalized Pregnancy: Ambivalent Compliance and Critical Pragmatism

This article addresses the medicalization of pregnancy in Israel and its effects on the experiences of Jewish-Israeli men who participated in various stages of their female partners' prenatal care. The highly medicalized arena of Israeli prenatal care, with its strong emphasis on prenatal diagnostic testing, provided the context in which the men's accounts of their interactions with reproductive biomedical authority, practitioners and knowledge were understood. It is suggested that the anthropological scholarship on reproduction assumes that men benefit from the medicalization of pregnancy and birth and comply with medicalization. Women, on the other hand, are often depicted as being subjected to harmful medical surveillance and responding to it in degrees, ranging from compliance to resistance, and mediated by pragmatism. Data derived from participant observation in multiple arenas and from 16 in-depth interviews with Israeli men whose female partners were pregnant or had recently given birth suggest that although some Israeli men regard the biomedicalization of pregnancy positively, most tend toward varying degrees of criticism. It is suggested that men's responses to reproductive biomedicine are far more complex than portrayed to date in the existing scholarship and that men's responses to biomedicalization reveal complex power negotiations.     

Psychiatry and Military Conscription in Brazil: The Search for Opportunity and Institutionalized Therapy

Since the fall of the Brazilian military dictatorship in 1984, a number of structural and ideological changes associated with demilitarization and democracy have changed the face of psychiatric theory and practice. Around the country, pockets of innovative, politically sensitive and Marxist-inspired community-based forms of "psi" practice are developing. This emergent psi movement is making a range of positive contributions to the lives of average citizens, including those of poor disenfranchized youth. This paper, however, explores one particular dimension of the work of psi practitioners that has proven antithetical to the psi community's current politicized community-based aims. Based on qualitative and quantitative longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork with therapists and young men in Pelotas, this paper analyzes how certain kinds of psi interventions being carried out in schools for a subset of lower-class young men during their early teen years are encouraging some youth to seek military training as a life option. Although these young men initially had quite captivating, engaged and politicized-if also conflicting-interactions with therapists, their eventual disillusionment with their therapeutic and scholastic experiences resulted in high levels of social alienation and de-politicization. In these young men's search for what can best be described as formulaic solutions to troubling psychological experiences associated with a tumultuous institutionalized transition to adulthood, military training came to represent a form of self-cultivation and self-therapy. Several youth also hoped military training would enable them to actively disengage with local political processes and find shelter from troubling social inequities and injustice. The paper ends by reviewing the implications of these results for the future of psi knowledge and practice in Brazil.