Mary Horton-Salway & Alison Davies 
The Discourse of ADHD 
Perspectives on Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

This book explores the discourse of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), one of the most debated mental health categories attributed to children and adults across the globe. The authors trace the origins, development and representation of ADHD to demonstrate how the category is produced through competing explanatory theories and processes of scientific, professional and lay discourse. Starting with the idea that medical categories are as much a product of cultural meaning, social processes and models of medicine as they are of scientific fact, this book utilises a range of perspectives from within critical discursive psychology to approach this topic. The authors discuss historical construction, media representation, parents’ accounts of family life, and the personal experience of children and adults to demonstrate how the construction of social identity and cultural stereotypes are embedded in the meaning of ADHD. They explore the origins of ADHD and how biological and psychosocial explanations of the mental health category have been produced, circulated, debated and resisted within a culture of ‘Othering’, and the discourse of blame. 

Table of Content

Chapter 1: Introduction; Mary Horton-Salway and Alison Davies.- Chapter 2: Mapping the Discourses of ADHD: The Historical Legacy; Alison Davies.- Chapter 3: Media Representations of ADHD; Mary Horton-Salway.- Chapter 4: ‘Normal Rules of Parenting Don’t Apply’: ADHD, maternal accountability and Mother Identities; Alison Davies.- Chapter 5: ‘Just an Active Boy’: Intersecting Discourses of ADHD, Masculinity and Father Identities; Alison Davies.- Chapter 6: Voices of Experience: Narrative Lives and Selves; Mary Horton-Salway.- Chapter 7: ‘ADHD as the Product of Discourse’; Mary Horton-Salway.

About the author

Mary Horton-Salway is a member of the British Psychological Society, UK, and Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, specialising in social psychology and the discourse of health, illness and disability, ME and ADHD.





Alison Davies is a member of the British Psychological Society, UK, and the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. She is Associate Lecturer at The Open University, and also works as an academic consultant in higher education and as a counselling psychotherapist.