ADHD Experience and Diagnosis: A Societal Perspective

Beginnings

Discussions around ADHD are pervasive in popular media, in schools, as well as institutions of higher education; a closer examination reveals under-representation of vast sections of population based on gender, race, and class, both in terms of diagnosis, and experience of ADHD. This study focuses on gaps in diagnosis through a qualitative analysis of experiences--those of adults who were diagnosed late, as well as parents, teachers, and professionals from the mental health community who are the first lines of encounter with conditions related to ADHD. This study also examines issues of invisibility and visibility in that, why are boys diagnosed more often than girls, why are some races represented more in the special services arena than others, schools as a site for diagnosis and how they complicate or perpetuate prevalent ‘ADHD and girls,’ ‘ADHD and boys,’ ‘ADHD and motherhood ’ discourses, how subjects respond to such disciplining through discursive practices—“what is said and what is done, rules imposed and reasons given, the planned and the taken for granted,” and politics of difference in medical research through a theoretical framework of agnotology, science, technology and society studies, interpretative and genealogical debates, feminist disability studies, neuro-diversity and neurofeminism (Foucault qtd. in Malacrida, 45). 

My foray into the world ADHD diagnosis and experiences started with findings in a special services review report issued by a local school district offered an analysis of students receiving special services by gender, race and ethnicity; girls were under represented while boys were over represented through all educational levels. The report revealed that only 33% females received special education services as opposed to 64% males. There was no data pertaining to gender non-conforming students. The race/ethnicity analysis disclosed that white student populations and Hispanic/Latino demographics were over represented whereas Asians were under-represented (9). The data is not disorder specific and since I am particularly interested in the phenomenon of ADHD, in addition to the gaps in diagnosis mentioned earlier, I began wondering why a notoriously ubiquitous learning difference was on the one hand being represented as over diagnosed in the media, but on the other hand was going unnoticed in certain kids, especially girls (Hinshaw, 106). Stephen Hinshaw, professor at UC Berkeley and author of The ADHD Explosion: Myths, Medication, Money and Today’s Push for Performance, said of the media that there was "a lingering impression that ADHD is largely fake," that there was a mis-representation of mental illnesses in the media; even The New York Times ran several pieces in 2012-2013 that implied that AD(H)D was a "medicalized excuse for problems in parenting, schools, and culture at large---with medications being Band-Aids at best" (102, 106).

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