Psychiatrised childhoods – ‘Psychiatrisation’ describes the process by which an ever-expanding assemblage of human life experiences have come to be observed, understood, enacted and acted upon through the language, theories, technologies and institutional practices of Western biomedical psychiatry. Ever since the medical profession seized its opportunity to profit in the ‘mad trade’ during the late 18th and early 19th centuries and ‘psychiatry’ established itself as a new sub-specialty of medicine, various cognitive, behavioural and emotional states have been governed by ‘illness’ and ‘disorder’ categories which draw boundaries around ‘normality’ and ‘abnormality’ (Coppock and Hopton, 2000). The normal/abnormal binary is the organising mechanism for psychiatrisation, while diagnosis is the process by which individuals are marked out as ‘mentally ill/disordered’; an exercise operationalised by the use of professional manuals such as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5) of the American Psychiatric Association (APA, 2013) and the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, Tenth Revision (ICD-10) (WHO, 1992). Those who meet specified criteria can be classified as having a mental disorder, thus ‘marking certain mental and emotional states and experiences as different, abnormal and pathological against preconceived notions of ‘normal mental health’ (Liegghio, 2016: 114).