A life story is presented with the aim of analyzing the particular manifestations of an individual path, in dialogue with the elements present in the lives of young people in popular groups. It focuses on discussion of social equipment for production of meanings, places and distress in some lives, which causes processes in which "diseases" and medicalization are generated from social problems. Based on the assumptions of ethnographic research, the path followed by a young woman through the social services for child and youth care and for mental health was tracked for four years. It is considered that social politics should intervene among youth people under a broad comprehension of social problems; and that the field of mental health care, in connection with the social sphere, should provide care in situations of distress without homogenization of needs, which would translate into iatrogeny and medicalization of the social context.
Adolescent; Life story; Social work; Iatrogeny; Social medicalization