Owning Up to Complexity: A Sociocultural Orientation to Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

To enrich our conception of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), it is necessary to take a wider orientation to this disability category than has been advocated traditionally. Over the past decade, there has been an emerging conception of ADHD from a sociocultural perspective, and this orientation, when linked to the traditional biomedical perspective, provides a more accurate and authentic construct of ADHD. In this article, we advocate that speech-language pathologists approach ADHD with a mindset that is open to the complexities of context-bound human functioning at all levels. Four sources of data demonstrating the richness of the sociocultural orientation are presented and clinical implications are detailed

KEYWORDS

ADHD - complexity - sociocultural perspective

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