From Looping to Rippling: Mothers, Diagnostic Expansion, and ADHD in Israeli Families of Diagnosed Children

Abstract

We examine diagnostic expansion of ADHD in Israel, based on interviews with mothers who came to identify with the ADHD label after their children were diagnosed. Applying a feminist psychiatric disability perspective, we show that diagnoses reverberate in families and raise unexpected stakes, meanings, and possibilities for mothers. In particular, women’s social role as mothers is central to a sense of “failure” that they associate with ADHD, as well as a main site of self-cultivation, experimentation, and change. Diagnostic expansion is thus an open-ended and relational process, implicating multiple dimensions of self over the life course.