Abstract
In this final chapter, Mary Horton-Salway draws together the key points arising from the different perspectives on ADHD, arguing that the meaning of ADHD has been socially constructed through history and there are different ‘translations’, produced by science, in medical practice and in public discourse through accounts of personal experience. The chapter summarises how ‘battles over truth’ have produced ADHD as an epiphenomenal product arising from both scientific and social processes of meaning making. Construction, resistance and contestation are important aspects of how ADHD and other mental health categories are defined and understood across the chapters of this book and these processes are discussed in relation to stigma, the decline of public trust in expert forms of knowledge and in public take up of health knowledge as both consumers and producers. The issue of ‘resistance’ is also discussed in relation to the discourse of neurodiversity and the cultural politics of impairment in categories such as autism or ADHD. The book concludes by considering the relevance of a social constructionist approach to inform educational and clinical practice in mental health care contexts.
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Horton-Salway, M., Davies, A. (2018). ADHD as the Product of Discourse. In: The Discourse of ADHD. The Language of Mental Health. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76026-1_7
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