AUTHOR=Witeska-Młynarczyk Anna 

TITLE=Psychiatrization of adoption practices in contemporary Poland

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Sociology

VOLUME=Volume 7 - 2022

YEAR=2022

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sociology/articles/10.3389/fsoc.2022.869593

DOI=10.3389/fsoc.2022.869593

ISSN=2297-7775

ABSTRACT=In this paper, I propose to take a closer look at the practices of kinning in the context of adoption in contemporary Poland. I am interested in the social production of this “unfamiliar kind of kinship” (Carsten 2004) and the involvement in it of various actors who act towards defining the "adoptable" children and the "families of excess" who are capable of adopting. My focus will be on the ways in which the psy-chiatric knowledge and practices are implied in these social processes of defining and delimiting the norm, the proper, the ideal. This process can be called a progressing psychiatrization of kinning, this time developing on a specific terrain of adoption (i.e. the most desired state of exception from ideal family – nuclear, heteronormative, based around married, non-divorced couple etc.). I will consider both top-down and bottom-up processes within which the individuals, state institutions and psy-knowledge interact. I thus propose to look at a sub-process of psychiatrizaton which takes place in the specific ethnographic context at the intersection of family and social policies, medicalization and psychologization of familial relations and troubled, disconnected biographies.

Throughout the text, I discuss how the adoptive families become patients-consumers within the system of health-care. It is despite the fact that when  they enter the adoption network, they start to take part in the political process of solving the social problem. In fact, they become  at part of the network which enables privatization of the social problem and works towards individualizing the responsibility for solving it.