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Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in France and Ireland: Parents’ groups’ scientific and political framing of an unsettled condition

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Abstract

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is an unsettled condition whose history is characterised by controversy among medical professionals. Its emergence has frequently been interpreted as an example of the growing ‘medicalisation’ of society and the individualisation of social issues. This article examines how groups representing children with ADHD in France and Ireland engage within this contested medical domain to develop different politics of knowledge around the disorder which become visible in their ‘epistemic efforts’. These efforts emerge from, and enact, groups’ understandings of ADHD as a condition, and frame their development of a politics of healthcare as a basis for articulating claims to appropriate services and treatment. We show how, in Ireland, organisations remain committed to a biomedical approach to ADHD, although their practical efforts are oriented towards complementing medication with non-pharmaceutical treatments. In France, the key parents’ group opposes any paradigm that focuses exclusively on one aspect of the disorder, be it social, psychological or neurological; rather, it struggles to ‘open up’ the scientific domain of ADHD. Our empirical material therefore enables us to demonstrate patients’ organisations’ politics of knowledge as situated practices which aim to reshape the different networks of expertise on ADHD that exist in each country, and to explore medicalisation as a complex set of processes which is neither a solution to parents’ problems, nor an end point for their actions.

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Notes

  1. Conrad et al (2010) propose a more ‘agnostic’ view of medicalisation; in other words, that it is neither good nor bad.

  2. http://www.incadds.ie/useful-links.php.

  3. Neurofeedback is a type of biofeedback that focuses on the brain and central nervous system: by placing sensors on a person’s head, it provides a display of brain activity, or ‘brainwaves’ that can be monitored and retrained, but it is not necessarily perceived as a legitimate or evidence-based therapy by the wider medical community.

  4. http://www.incadds.ie/what-is-adhd-add.html, accessed 17 June 2010.

  5. http://www.hadd.ie/youthgroup.htlm.

  6. Disability studies (Albrecht et al, 2001) and activists played a crucial role by promoting an alternative social model for many years, which eventually led to the revision of the 1989 WHO Classification.

  7. According to participants in the group, and our interview with one of them, all these three categories are embedded in the French history of disability organisations and do not exist as such in other countries. Mental disability mainly refers to intellectual disability, whereas psychiatric disability denotes disability related to mental illnesses, and notably psychosis. Cognitive disability, the most recent category, refers to disability related to the alteration of all, or specific, cognitive functions.

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Acknowledgements

This article is based on a European research project called EPOKS (European Patients’ Organizations in Knowledge Society), supported by the European Commission FP7. We warmly thank HyperSupers and INCADDS’ members who agreed to be interviewed and welcomed us to their meetings. Our thanks also go to the anonymous reviewers who offered invaluable suggestions on how to improve the first version of this article.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Applied Social Studies, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland

    Claire Edwards & Etaoine Howlett

  2. Centre de sociologie de l’innovation, Mines-ParisTech, Paris, France

    Madeleine Akrich & Vololona Rabeharisoa

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  1. Claire Edwards
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  2. Etaoine Howlett
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  3. Madeleine Akrich
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  4. Vololona Rabeharisoa
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Correspondence to Vololona Rabeharisoa.

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Edwards, C., Howlett, E., Akrich, M. et al. Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in France and Ireland: Parents’ groups’ scientific and political framing of an unsettled condition. BioSocieties 9, 153–172 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/biosoc.2014.3

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