Investigating ADHD across education and health: a critical ethnographic approach

ABSTRACT

The article elaborates the theoretical and methodological foundations of a Foucauldian-inspired critical ethnographic investigation of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). The aim was to consider ADHD from outside its dominant biomedical explanation as a means of problematizing the increasing usage within schools and health services. The investigation targeted the conditions that made it possible to say and do ADHD, for it to be enacted by various professionals. Thus, the investigation does not to engage with ADHD as a ‘real’ condition, but reconnects wider historic, social, political, institutional and discursive events within and across apparatuses of health and education that were influential in the emergence of a ‘treatment’ approach to ADHD. The approach, instead of ‘treating’ a ‘real’ condition, legitimated inscription of the biomedical explanation, individualized an array of difficulties as ‘symptoms’, and allowed for the governance of young people through psychostimulant medication.

KEYWORDS:

• ADHD
• Foucault
• ethnography
• governmentality
• subjectivity
• health
• education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethics statement

The study described in the following manuscript adhere to the principles stated in the Declaration of Helsinki. Ethical clearance was granted by the NHS South East Scotland Research Ethics Committee 02 (REC reference: 15/SS/0114, IRAS project ID: 161526). All participants provided appropriate informed consent before engaging in the research project; all read a prepared PIS sheet prior to deciding on participation, then signed the consent form once informed consent had been established.