Psychiatrische Krankheitskategorien als traveling objects

The Making of ADHD: A Comparative Content Analysis of Teachers’ and Doctors’ Worldviews

“…Both groups, especially teachers, seem to be balancing between blaming and medicalizing, between disciplining and helping, teachers struggled between positively rewarding "good behavior" and justifying controlling school measures. This can be connected to the idea of understanding psychiatric disorders as "traveling" (Harbusch 2019) or "boundary" (Bowker and Star 1999) objects, rooted in the new conception of (ab)normality in society, for example, that of a "flexible normalisme" (Link 2009).…”

“…This attitude of teachers can also be understood as part of their professional habitus (Muel-Dreyfus 1983) acquired in their professional training. In the context of "making" an ADHD diagnosis, teachers might take on the role between that of a "scientifically educated practitioner" (Harbusch 2019) and that of a "lay men" (Schatzmann and Strauss 1966), whose knowledge is removed from the psychiatric province to a larger "hinterland", but is in their own comprehension "almost professional".…”