Through the looking-glass: a critical review of sociology and medicine towards the diagnosis of ADHD1

Abstract

In the last decades the domain of medicine assumed a central place within social science debates, particularly in Europe and North-America. Analyses of the professional dominance of medicine, the medicalization of sociality, and the categorization of deviance as psychiatric condition were at the onset of medical sociology and historiography. Such critiques aimed at shedding light on the ways we have come to consider not only what is health and illness but also what counts as normal or pathological behavior. In this sense, cases such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder [ADHD] exemplify a complex relation between biological and sociological explanations of human behavior. The paper looks at ADHD diagnosis as a heuristics for the critical review of the relationship between social and life sciences. That relationship, often thorny, will be then articulated with a wider hermeneutic and epistemological critique of the real and the constructed, the normal and the pathological, and their reconfigurations. In conclusion, a plea will be left with the intent of debunking conventional suspicions of sociology with regards to medicine through the recovery of an ‘anthroposcientific’ perspective.