Evaluation of Parents' Knowledge and Attitudes Regarding Self-Medication in the Dental Problems of Their Child During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Background: Self-medication means taking medicine without consultation with any doctor or dentist and an important health issue, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. The present study aims to evaluate the knowledge and attitudes of parents regarding self-medication in dental problems of their children during to COVID-19 pandemic in Northern Turkey. Methods: A cross-sectional survey was carried out in the pediatric dental clinic immediately after the COVID-19 lockdown ended. A total of 389 parents who agreed to participate in the study completed the questionnaire for three months. A structured questionnaire with 18 items was designed to collect information on the parents’ knowledge and attitudes regarding when, why, and how to use drugs and on their practices medicating children. Results: The majority of parents (n = 273; 70.2%) were practiced self-medication to their children's dental problems. Self-medication with a previous medication was usually preferred to their children by parents (n = 179; 62.2%). It was observed the analgesics practiced by parents (98%) were the most commonly used self-medication for their children's dental problems.Conclusion: New healthcare systems like tele-dentistry may be useful to overcome self-medication problems directed to children in unusual times that limit to reach healthcare providers such as pandemics.

Baseline

This chapter describes electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) that stabilized Jonah's rapid-cycling bipolar disorder in 2010 after exhaustive medication trials, elaborate behavior plans, and a ten-month hospitalization failed. It details how Jonah experiences mild episodes of agitation with no obvious environmental triggers toward the end of the treatment interval. It also analyses the term “baseline,” which refers to an original, predisease state. The chapter describes Jonah's treatments that were therapeutic to the extent they restored optimal, baseline functioning. It discusses opponents of medicating children that are fierce and pervasive, such as in books with ominous titles like The Silenced Child and Suffer the Children, and certain articles featured on well-respected platforms.

Psychiatrization of, with and by children: Drawing a complex picture

When discussed in the context of diagnosing or medicating children, psychiatrization is usually portrayed as a more or less monolithic top-down process, which, according to some, enables a child’s right to health, while for others is a form of child abuse. This article challenges these conceptualizations in two steps: First, it draws on available literature on psychiatrization (including its top-down and bottom-up operations, and its ideological and material aspects), and its relationship to various psy-practices, and wider processes of (bio) medicalization, psychologization and reification. Second, using two detailed vignettes from ethnographic research with children and youth in Poland, the article demonstrates that children and youth are not necessarily passive recipients of psychiatrization as they themselves navigate, appropriate, resist, and transform top-down influences. While one vignette details a child’s more or less open resistance to psychiatrization through their attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder label, the other vignette shows young people embracing and positively identifying with bio and psy-knowledge in relation to depression. However, both vignettes show how children and youth make psychiatrization meaningful as it shapes their lifeworlds, with them sometimes becoming agents of psychiatrization themselves. Our data illustrate the nuances of psychiatrization of, with and by children, and we draw on this to complexify existing literature and framings of psychiatrization.