Agency through medicalization: Ghanaian children navigating illness, medicine and adult resistance

Medicalization in the Global North assumes that bottom-up medicalization is driven by increasing consumer power, risk avoidance among professionals, or emancipation. Building on ethnographic work of the first author, this article aimed to explore the existence and conditions of a different and novel mechanism and found children manifesting agency through self-medicalization. We look at how Ghanaian children pragmatically deal with everyday health concerns and argue children are agents of medicalization and medicalization enables agency in children. Through interpretive and collaborative content analysis of structured ethnographic observations of 105 children from different class backgrounds (between June 2016 and December 2017) we found children in Northern Ghana framed situations of feeling ill in markedly biomedical terms and persisted in biomedical treatment even with opposition from adults. We observed that children intentionally navigated opposition from adults, mobilized support through networks, exploited power differences between adults, and organized treatment among themselves if necessary. While girls had an even harder time to muster recognition from adults, we also discovered children from a lower socioeconomic background, with more experience on the street had more leeway in navigating lack of support. So far, children's agency in health and illness has only been discussed in instances where children had already received a professional diagnosis. In our case where children had not yet received a professional diagnosis, we find that agency is enabled through bodily awareness, experience, interactions with peers, family, and the media; all working as tools for children to self-diagnose and to deal with illness in a postcolonial setting.