Interrogating Diagnoses in the Global South

Abstract

This article proposes a critical analysis of the development and use of psychiatric diagnoses from a Global South perspective, situating them as tools historically traversed by hegemonic, racial, gender, and ableist norms. Initially, it problematizes the ontology of disease and the illusion of neutrality in medical classifications, drawing on the concept of "interactive kinds" and the rejection of the individual model of disability in favor of the Clinic of the Subject and the social model. Next, it investigates the market capture of human diversity through the "Autism Industrial Complex," highlighting how the rhetorics of fear, hope, and scientism operate as a smokescreen that individualizes care and obliterates structural inequalities. An intersectional lens is then mobilized to interrogate the color and gender of these classifications, demonstrating how whiteness establishes itself as an invisible universal norm and how psychiatric categories operate to pathologize gender dissidence and criminalize Black bodies. Finally, the study grounds itself in the reality of institutional care for children and adolescents in Brazil, denouncing the production of "residual children" or "unadoptables"—subjects whose trajectories of vulnerability are reduced to medical reports that justify chronic institutionalization and chemical restraint. It concludes by emphasizing the urgency of breaking the academic silence surrounding institutionalized populations and the need to reclaim a Diagnosis with a capital "D"—one that is narrative, relational, and emancipatory, allied with the dismantling of oppressions.