 Not all diagnoses are created equal: Mothers’ narratives of children, ADHD, and comorbid diagnosesTalia Fried and Galia Plotkin-Amrami Social Science & Medicine, 2023, vol. 323, issue C Abstract: Social research examining patients' and caretakers' narration of mental disorders, including ADHD, has been remarkably silent about comorbidity. Centering the theme of uncertainty and the question of what is “at stake” in mothers' mental health narratives of children (Kleinman, 1988), we characterize the patchwork process by which mothers deploy ADHD and comorbid diagnoses to account for key experiences and struggles in their and their child's lives. We found that ADHD had limited purchase in accounting for the emotional and social difficulties that were most urgent in mothers' narratives, despite the medical authority behind the ADHD label, which the mothers mostly accepted. However, mothers remained pervasively uncertain about the relationship between ADHD and comorbid mental health conditions, paralleling debates on the relationship between ADHD, emotion, and comorbidity in the psychiatric and psychological literature. Keywords: Israel; Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD); Comorbidity; Narrative; Sociology of diagnosis; Mothers; Children; Uncertainty (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:socmed:v:323:y:2023:i:c:s0277953623001958 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2023.115838 Access Statistics for this article Social Science & Medicine is currently edited by Ichiro (I.) Kawachi and S.V. (S.V.) Subramanian More articles in Social Science & Medicine from Elsevier |
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