The Discourse Of Adhd

This book explores the discourse of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), one of the most debated mental health categories attributed to children and adults across the globe. The authors trace the origins, development and representation of ADHD to demonstrate how the category is produced through competing explanatory theories and processes of scientific, professional and lay discourse. Starting with the idea that medical categories are as much a product of cultural meaning, social processes and models of medicine as they are of scientific fact, this book utilises a range of perspectives from within critical discursive psychology to approach this topic. The authors discuss historical construction, media representation, parents’ accounts of family life, and the personal experience of children and adults to demonstrate how the construction of social identity and cultural stereotypes are embedded in the meaning of ADHD. They explore the origins of ADHD and how biological and psychosocial explanations of the mental health category have been produced, circulated, debated and resisted within a culture of ‘Othering’, and the discourse of blame.

Framing ADHD Children explores the three social worlds of Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder: the home, classroom, and clinic. Through intensive interviews with teachers, parents, clinicians, and ADHD children, this book brings to light the human experiences surrounding this behavior disorder. The experiences of interview participants are supplemented with the most detailed historical discussion of ADHD to date, including the past and present debates about the true "nature" of the disorder, issues concerning children taking stimulant medications, and the continuing discussion of whether or not modern technology can really detect ADHD in the brain. Both the history of ADHD and the people interviewed here demonstrate that ADHD is far from a cut-and-dry phenomenon, but rather a complex social process that requires the negotiation of uncertainty and ambiguity at every step.

Framing ADHD Children explores the three social worlds of Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder: the home, classroom, and clinic. Through intensive interviews with teachers, parents, clinicians, and ADHD children, this book brings to light the human experiences surrounding this behavior disorder. The experiences of interview participants are supplemented with the most detailed historical discussion of ADHD to date, including the past and present debates about the true 'nature' of the disorder, issues concerning children taking stimulant medications, and the continuing discussion of whether or not modern technology can really detect ADHD in the brain. Both the history of ADHD and the people interviewed here demonstrate that ADHD is far from a cut-and-dry phenomenon, but rather a complex social process that requires the negotiation of uncertainty and ambiguity at every step.

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is the most commonly diagnosed psychiatric condition of childhood worldwide, yet the medical and psychological perspectives that dominate our understandings of ADHD present problems in their reductive understanding of the condition. Exploring ADHD incorporates Michel Foucault’s notions of discourse and power into a critical ethnographic framework in order to analyse ADHD in terms of both the historical conditions that have shaped understandings of the disorder, and also the social conditions which build individual diagnostic cases in today’s schools and families. In this ground-breaking text, Simon Bailey also: acknowledges the necessary work of classrooms, schools and families in contributing to a social order; examines the problem of teacher autonomy and the constraints placed on schools to ‘perform’; describes the role of nurture groups in governing the emotional conduct of children; presents a unique gender analysis of ADHD. This fascinating new book will be of interest to researchers and academics in the field of early childhood education, special and inclusive education, and will illuminate and spark new debate in the arena of ADHD.

For many researchers, clinicians, teachers, patients, and family members, the discourse on ADHD has been occurring in silos. Traditional ADHD camps are organized primarily in terms of neurological and cognitive perspectives and to a lesser extent psychoanalytic/psychodynamic perspectives. Those with an interest in ADHD have not been able to obtain a comprehensive understanding of the disorder and consequently have been restricted in psychotherapy treatment options. This book argues for the integration of the three perspectives on ADHD. Drawing on the expertise of an international range of contributors, the volume addresses questions from a psychoanalytic vantage point which have considerable meaning in clinical work with children who have ADHD. They examine the role of trauma and attachment problems as both a possible antecedent to ADHD, and as an outgrowth of ADHD which predisposes the child to limitations in emotion regulation, social adversity, an even maltreatment. Several questions pertinent to psychodynamic treatment and relevant case studies are discussed including: a) the viability of psychoanalysis/psychodynamic treatment for ADHD children b) the impact of early traumatic experience on the child’s specific weaknesses in attention, over-reactivity and dysregulation c) contributions of problems in object relations and regressive defences to ADHD symptoms d) and the importance of other intrapsychic issues. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Infant, Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy.

This book brings together, for the first time, a selection of international critiques on the role of ADHD in our society today, looking at how diagnoses have increased in recent years and the reasons behind this. Topics range from genetics to social culture, offering a comprehensive overview of this area.

Experiences and Explanations of ADHD: An Ethnography of Adults Living with a Diagnosis presents research on the lived experiences of those diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Drawing on in-depth interviews with adults diagnosed with ADHD, the book provides an examination of how the diagnosis is understood, used, and acted upon by the people receiving the diagnosis. The book delves into the phenomenology of ADHD and uncovers the experiences of a highly debated diagnosis from a first-person perspective. It further considers these experiences within the context of our time and culture and contributes to a discussion of how to understand human diversity and deviance in contemporary society. Studying both societal conditions behind the emergence of ADHD, questions concerning everyday life with ADHD, and interpretations of the diagnosis, the book offers an analysis of the intertwinement of experiences of suffering and diagnostic categories. This book will appeal to academics, researchers, and postgraduate students in the fields of cultural psychology and medical anthropology, as well as those with an interest in the sociology of diagnoses.

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) has achieved celebrity status in many Western countries, yet despite considerable effort to prove its existence as a «real» disorder, ADHD still suffers from a crisis of legitimacy. Nonetheless, diagnosis and prescription of medication has grown at a phenomenal rate since the late 1980s, particularly in Western culture. Numerous accounts exist explaining how the ADHD diagnosis functions as a convenient administrative loophole, providing schools with a medical explanation for school failure, medication to sedate the «problem» into submission, or the means to eject children from mainstream classrooms. This book provides a more holistic interpretation of how to respond to children who might otherwise be diagnosed with and medicated for «ADHD» - a diagnosis which, whether scientifically valid or not, is unhelpful within the confine of the school. Training teachers to recognise and identify «ADHD symptoms» or to understand the functions of restricted pharmaceuticals will only serve to increase the number of children diagnosed and the sale of psychoactive medications. Research has shown that such activities will not help those children learn, nor will it empower their classroom teachers to take responsibility for teaching such children well. This book seeks to provide school practitioners with knowledge that is useful within the educational context to improve the educational experiences and outcomes for children who might otherwise receive a diagnosis of ADHD.