Paper short abstract:

This presentation will discuss how race, disability, and other social identifiers are co-constituted with pathologies by exploring racial disparities in attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) diagnoses.

Paper long abstract:

Recent studies have shown that attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), two disorders commonly diagnosed in childhood, are disparately diagnosed by race. One study has found that Black and Latino children are significantly less likely to receive an ADHD diagnosis compared to their White peers (Morgan et al. 2013), and another that Black and Latino children are more likely to receive an ODD diagnosis than an ADHD one (Fadus 2019). While both diagnoses have social and legal implications, an ODD one has greater consequences including increased barriers to disability accommodation in schools (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act 2004) and higher assessments of criminality in the juvenile justice system (Rockett et al. 2007).

What is considered clinically normal and abnormal is constantly being revised. For disorders like ADHD and ODD, which merely describe a set of behaviors, these revisions are even more frequent. How do race, disability, and other social identifiers influence the creation, distribution, and reinforcement of diagnoses? Past scholarship has looked at the medicalization of nonnormative behavior as a form of social control wherein deviant or unproductive behavior is reconfigured as a sickness that can thus be corrected. I believe that comparing the rates of diagnosis and perceptions of ADHD and ODD, informed by past scholarship on race, disability, and gender in the education and carceral system, could elucidate new connections between how pathologies and social identities are co-constituted. In this presentation I will discuss my preliminary outline for addressing these questions.