The uncomfortable, but in the end unavoidable, truth is that ‘ADHD’, far from being a ‘neurodevelopmental disorder’, the recent rise in reported incidence for which is supposedly accounted for by the helpfully self-congratulatory notion that we are getting better and better at recognising it, is in fact an artificial construct that simply serves to inappropriately medicalise and therefore fundamentally misattribute the increasingly damaging effects of American-style hyper-capitalist consumer society on child development. It has long been a cornerstone of attachment theory that less emotionally secure children will often behaviourally ‘act out’ their feelings of anxiety. Is it really all that difficult to see that, in a society where working-class living standards have declined over the past four decades, and indeed have outright collapsed over the past four years, with all of the social breakdown this inevitably entails, many of the most vulnerable children’s sense of emotional security will obviously have been profoundly compromised? Is it really all that difficult to see that a society in which both parents have to work longer and longer hours for lower and lower wages, with less and less time to spend with their children, will obviously have a negative impact on those parents’ ability to parent as effectively as they would like? Is it really all that difficult to see that a society in which an all-pervasive corporate media bombards children with relentless advertisements and a way of being that celebrates loud, aggressive individualism will obviously result in a general tendency for many children to become more hyperactive, inattentive, and impulsive? And this is before we have even touched upon such related issues as the selling-off of state school playing fields to private-sector developers, the increasing preponderance of cheap junk food in children’s diets, or the stultifying stress-inducing effects of the relentlessly target-driven National Curriculum on children and teachers alike. Though sociological perspectives such as these intuitively hit the nail on the head about ‘ADHD’, one would be hard-pressed these days to find any such hypothesis in the pages of the leading medical and psychiatric journals – which instead prefer to investigate ad absurdum the most tenuous associations with genes and various other biological variables. cpgb-ml.org/index.php?secName=proletarian&subName=display&art=1080
Posted on: Wed, 17 Dec 2014 13:49:58 +0000
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