The DSM and the dangerous school child

The history of ADHD is in part a history of children who have not fitted in at school. Yet until recently, surges in diagnostic levels had not prompted a questioning of the school’s complicity in the trend. Through an analysis of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM), the principal diagnostic guideline relating to ADHD, this paper seeks to deconstruct some of the techniques and practices by which ‘the truth of disorderly subjects’, as mentioned by V. Harwood, is told within school. It will be argued that a focus on risk in early childhood promotes depoliticised notions of choice and responsibility feeding conclusions of individualised deficit. The emergence and influence of the DSM is offered here as illustrative of the alliance between the disciplines of medicine, psychology and education. Unchecked, such an alliance will lead to the further conflation of social and individual dysfunction, keeping more transformative notions of social inclusion obscured.