Adaptive will: The evolution of attention deficit disorder

Abstract

The increasing prevalence of attention-deficit disorder among American school children was a source of significant controversy in the 1990s. This paper looks at the social and historical contexts in which ADD evolved in order to understand its emergence as a coherent and widespread entity. Changes in expert models of child behavior interacted with the formation of new identities around disability to shape a milieu in which the disorder could thrive. The pattern of affect control, of what must and what must not be restrained, regulated, and transformed, is certainly not the same in this stage as in the preceding one of court aristocracy. In keeping with its different interdependencies, bourgeois society applies stronger restrictions to certain impulses, while in the case of others aristocratic restrictions are simply continued and transformed to suit the changed situation (Elias, 1994, p. 125). © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.