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Purpose – I analyze how laypersons and professionals navigate challenges to the legitimacy of Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (AD/HD). The disorder is modeled as a cultural object manifested in the discursive practices of multiple actors forming a knowledge coalition of professionals, laypersons, governmental, and corporate actors. Coalition members faced challenges to the disorder derived from popular skepticism and from professional's contradictory knowledge claims and diagnostic practices.

Methods – I observed these processes in a two-year, ethnographic case study supplemented with a two-stage, open-ended interview with core members of an AD/HD informational and support group.

Findings – Parents and coalitional professionals managed these challenges differently depending on the status of the source (professional vs. nonprofessional) and the alignment (within the coalition vs. nonaligned) of the challenge. Nonprofessional skeptics were easily countered as ignorant moralists who lacked objective knowledge of the disorder – a tactic termed credentialism. The contradictory diagnoses and treatments of professionals were managed as instances of mal-diagnosis – a construct employed by both professionals aligned with the diagnosis and laypersons associated with the disorder. Finally, while parents actively sought a diagnosis as an objective valorization of their status, they remained skeptical of AD/HD; however, in achieving diagnosis they also worried that the methods used to establish a diagnosis were possibly unreliable.

Originality/value – This study contributes to the emergent sociology of diagnosis by describing the techniques used by laypersons and some professionals in maintaining a contentious diagnosis.

The purpose of this paper is to explain why individuals with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (AD/HD) gravitate towards and excel in highly dynamic environments such as those encountered by family business owners.

This conceptual paper draws on extant literature to establish parallels between the executive functions of individuals with AD/HD and entrepreneurial cognition. The authors use previous theoretical and empirical research to suggest that the use of intuition in the decision‐making process may explain the link between individuals with AD/HD and entrepreneurs.

Family members with AD/HD suffer from diminished executive functions that force them to make decisions and act upon information that would be insufficient for the non‐entrepreneur in the family.

The paper presents evidence suggesting a link between executive functions and intuitive decision making in the family business context, however, empirical research is now warranted to advance this line of research.

Establishing the relationship between AD/HD and entrepreneurship may lead family business leaders to identify and integrate family members with AD/HD in to the family firm.

The contribution of this paper is to explain, based on bounded rationality, why individuals with AD/HD gravitate to entrepreneurship.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between psychopathic features as measured with the Psychopathy Checklist: Youth Version (PCL:YV) and behavioural and emotional functioning in young female offenders in custody.

This is a quantitative interview study investigating the relationship with psychopathic traits, measured with the PCL:YV (Forth et al., 2003), and different psychological characteristics as well as AD/HD, self-harm, and childhood trauma in adolescent offenders across genders. Data were collected from a sample of 40 female and 40 male adolescents who were incarcerated in Victoria, Australia.

Results indicated that the behavioural subscales of the PCL:YV were associated with externalising behaviours possibly underpinned by histories of abuse and substantiated child protection incidences. The presence of AD/HD was strongly associated with affective deficits suggesting that the PCL:YV may be identifying young females with AD/HD rather than core psychopathic traits. Findings also indicate that female-specific manifestations of manipulation are likely being misidentified as behavioural phenomena precluding clinical recognition as a core interpersonal trait. Significant dissimilarities with a young male comparison group were identified and are discussed within.

The sample size is very small and the results should be seen as an indication rather than generalising.

Studies on female juvenile offenders is rare and this study adds to the literature on the construct of psychopathy and its relationship to psychosocial factors as well as associations with AD/HD, self-harm, and childhood trauma, among incarcerated adolescents.

Lead is a well-established environmental contaminant that over the last 50 years has become recognized as a neurotoxin with its greatest concern for the developing child (i.e. both in-utero and postnatally). What is problematic is that children exposed to lead often come from lower socioeconomic status (SES), are largely Black communities and are further at increased risk for developing adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). The literature on ACEs had focused much on trauma, single parenting, child abuse, lack of finances and stress, etc., but has not considered the intersectionality of these ACEs as risk factors within environmental neurotoxic exposures such as lead poisoning. This is important as most low SES communities are Black. In particular, within the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), Black families have been neglected of proper lead-abatement to their apartments for nearly 70 years.

This is a viewpoint/perspective paper that examines the lived experiences of Black folxs in NYCHA through a Black critical theory (BlackCrit) and antiblackness framework pertaining to ACEs, and lead poisoning within the NYCHA system of New York City. This perspective paper draws upon the last three years of news reports, five decades of publicly available data sets from NYCHA and the comptroller to raise an awareness of how Black children are treated by NYCHA generation after generation which can be argued as a mass atrocity against NYCHA residents. Furthermore, the systematic and institutionalized racism and environmental injustices by NYCHA and the state can also be considered as a crime against humanity. As such, BlackCrit could help to position awareness, advocacy and knowledge about Black folxs residing in NYCHA to achieve fair, safe and affordable public housing to experience Black joy across future generations.

Thus, rather than civic and state government response efforts focusing their full attention and resources to serving and supporting individuals affected by ACEs they should equally consider the environments in which Black people live and also allocate funds proportionally to address these areas often overlooked. Moreover, proportions of these funds should be redirected especially to lead-abatement and removal of known sources of lead exposures, evaluation of suspected sources of lead exposures (i.e. drinking water, baby food and formula, children’s juice and cereal products, superfund and other waste sites, electronic recycling plants, etc.) and accompanied by all affected children undergoing full and comprehensive neuropsychological testing and follow up studies paid for by the state. The goal should have two fundamental objectives: (1) accepting accountability for failing to address these preventable neuropsychological issues directly affecting Black children generation after generation and (2) offering the proper waived or reimbursable supports and resources to help Black children sustain the best quality of life (QOL) trajectory possible when diagnosed with lead poisoning.

The manuscript is a viewpoint/perspective paper grounded in BlackCrit and an antiblackness framework. There are ample public news reports and public data available from NYCHA on these matters over the last three years. However, the scope of this paper was not to delve too deep into these numbers per se, but rather to address the concerns leading up to and arguably contributing to, at least in part, to these numbers of lead-exposed Black children in NYCHA. Lead poisoning has never been considered as an ACE and its relationship to mass atrocity research is novel which may pave a new avenue for research of this kind through the utility of BlackCrit and antiblackness framework to support and advocate for change so that Black children can be provided with a basic human right of safe housing and experience Black joy.

BlackCrit has not been used in the context of lead poisoning research. Mostly individuals and families of middle- and low-income have been studied in the context of poverty and lead poisoning. However, many people who live in poverty, in public housing, within New York are Black. Thus, Black children are generation after generation exposed to unaddressed lead-abatement and it appears that now more than ever BlackCrit should become the framework for how this work should be discussed in the literature to raise awareness to state governments regarding Black folx's persistent lead poisoning, NYCHA's neglect and mass atrocity research as a long overdue advocacy effort to bring the necessary voice, authentic narrative, and actual knowledge of the lived experiences of Black families in NYCHA with lead poisoning.

The goal of this viewpoint/perspective paper should have two fundamental objectives (1) NYCHA and New York State accepting accountability for failing to address these preventable lead poisoning issues directly affecting Black children; and (2) offering the proper support and resources to help Black children sustain the best QOL trajectory possible when diagnosed with lead poisoning.

Lead poisoning research has never been approached through a mass atrocity and BlackCrit framework and perspective. This is the first report on bridging these fields within the context of NYCHA public housing neglect of lead-abatement and continued poisoning of current and future generations of Black children. This failure of NYCHA lead-abatement contributes annually to economic loss in New York State for many years to come which could be entirely avoided.

Throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, one of the many techniques used by physicians and psychiatrists to diagnose patients involved external and highly public examination. Typically conducted as a lecture to other medical experts and students, the patient was placed in the center of a round room with onlookers arranged in tiered seating to guarantee an unobstructed view. As the lead physician detailed the list of symptoms, using the patient's body as an illustration, observers witnessed the behavioral signs for themselves and discussed the possible underlying conditions or pathologies. This process of consultation and naming worked to increase the relative reliability among experts and bolster the professional reputations of medicine and psychiatry alike (Conrad & Schneider, 1992; Gillis, 2006; Grob & Horwitz, 2010). As researchers have noted (Aronowitz, 2001; Foucault, 1973), this change from focusing on disparate, idiosyncratic symptoms as expressions of individual illness to a system that recognized disease states comprised of symptom clusters marks a historical turning point in the history of medicine. The shift toward a classification scheme that linked medicine with science and technology bolstered medical authority and the power of physicians. In addition to professional credentials, accumulated knowledge, and institutional legitimacy, the authority of modern medicine both rests on and is expressed by medicine's decisive power to name and categorize through diagnosis (Jutel, 2009). Even as medical prestige has eroded, ceding some of its power to other entities,¹ physicians remain the final arbiter of official medical categories (Pescosolido, 2006), judges of what is, and what is not, a “real” diagnosis. In the diagnostic process, one looks within to reveal the nature of disease from without – empirical observation becomes immutable fact. Of course, as critical perspectives on medicine have long pointed out (Conrad & Schneider, 1992; Zola, 1972), the scientific “fact” of one time and place is the mythology or ignorance of another. Diagnosis, as both category and process (Blaxter, 1978), is infused with all manner of things social, historical, and cultural. This volume explores some of these infusions. In so doing, it aims to clarify and contribute to the emerging sociology of diagnosis – an endeavor first called for by Brown (1990), but more recently revived by Jutel (2009).

Inclusive education is promoted internationally as the most effective way of educating all children. Concurring with this, parents increasingly seek out inclusive schooling for their child with disability, rather than placement in a special segregated facility. There is, nonetheless, enormous diversity between countries and regions in the form that this takes, depending upon local policies, contexts and government and school commitment to an inclusive approach. Listening to the voices of parents and self-advocates from different regions about their personal experiences when endeavouring to access an inclusive schooling option can provide greater clarity about the process and how easy it is for families to take this route. The following stories are told by four parents from different countries and one self-advocate about their journey to access an inclusive education for a child with a disability.