Accidental Intolerance: How We Stigmatize ADHD and How We Can Stop (PDF/EPUB Version)

To make this case, Hawthorne examines both standard practices and ongoing controversies in medical, scientific, and social approaches to ADHD, showing why professionals in each setting have chosen the practices and concepts they have. She then explains how the varying approaches influence one another, and how we might interrupt the pattern. Shared goals-decreasing stigmatization, providing new options for diagnosed people, and increasing knowledge-can drive the much-needed change. Adopting inclusive, responsive decision making in all areas of practice will foster it.

“Susan Hawthorne offers us a multifaceted, sensitive (and sensible) study of the emergence of ADHD as a distinct diagnostic condition in the last decade or so. Carefully analyzing the research from different disciplines and orientations, as well as the reports of experience of those so diagnosed and their families, she uncovers the ways in which values and factual findings from many directions have interacted to shape this psychiatric category. She concludes with recommendations intended to improve the scientific and clinical understanding of the phenomenon as well as the experience of ADHD-diagnosed individuals. An excellent contribution to contemporary science studies.” – Helen Longino, Stanford University