RE: illness and moral culpability

From: Nate (schmolze@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Mon Mar 13 2000 - 19:27:15 PST


 Scot said:

Nate said that "deconstructing certain discourses carry a
higher price than others." The danger of deconstructing ADHD is, if we push
to the extreme, that we might no longer view issues of childhood
(mis)behavior and school achievement in terms of individual pathology and
treatment model of medicine. For all those kids and families who have found
some degree of satisfaction by way of diagnosis and treatment, it is a
loss. That can't be denied. On the other hand, we have to wonder what this
means for our schools and families and communities when the medical
metaphors of pathology are increasingly applied to childhood. Do human
activities necessarily benefit when they are medicalized? Is it necessarily
safe when new aspects of everyday life are viewed as medical phenomena to be
treated, adjusted, augmented, controlled? I think there are dangers in
conflating medicine with morality such that alternative ways of
conceptualizing, talking about, and addressing lived experience (e.g. human
relationships, moral decisions) become difficult to arrange.
Scot Danforth

Virginia, Scot,

I was mostly playing devil's advocate. First, I agree with everything above
and these aspects of ADHD must not go unaddressed.

As far as a devil's advocate, in looking at the xcma archives some of the
harshist critiques of Coles were from psychologist or those in his field. I
think in many ways McDermett and others are a little safer in that the
medical discourse is not taken to task as strongly. One can go about
critiqueing, deconstructing "truth" of a "social" nature or maybe we should
say the soft truths, but when one takes on the "hard" truths it becomes
different.

Special ed has its connections with development in that there is a strong
relationship with medical discourses. You mention the danger of conflating
medicine with morality, yet I would have a difficult time imagining how they
could be seperated. For one, in both development and special education
there has always been a strong moral conponent and often been seen as
"progressive" or "liberating". This is mostly devil's advocate now, but I
can see the argument being made that a diagnosis of ADHD is much better than
moral pathology. This is not my reading, but a reading that will
nevertheless exist if the article is published in special education
journals.

So, I am curious as one in the field of special ed what has been the
reaction to this line of argument. I think when anthropoligists do this
kind of stuff its one thing, but when someone in the field does it the
reaction is different.

I enjoyed the paper very much.

Nate Schmolze
http://www.geocities.com/nate_schmolze/
schmolze@students.wisc.edu

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"Overcoming the naturalistic concept of mental development calls for a
radically new approach
to the interrelation between child and society. We have been led to this
conclusion by a
special investigation of the historical emergence of role-playing. In
contrast to the view
that role playing is an eternal extra-historical phenomenon, we hypothesized
that role playing emerged at a specific stage of social development, as the
child's position in society changed
in the course of history. role-playing is an activity that is social in
origin and,
consequently, social in content."

                              D. B. El'konin
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