Abstract
A hundred years ago mental disorders among children were considered rare, yet now diagnoses such as ADHD and autism are given to more than one in ten children in western society. Utilising Marxist scholarship, Cohen argues that rather than representing a real epidemic of mental disease in the young, this expansion closely reflects neoliberal requirements for more compliant, competitive, and skilled workers in the labour force. The chapter includes an extended case study of the construction of ADHD to demonstrate how the increasing infiltration of the psychiatric discourse into the education system has served to enforce the dominant moral codes and economic prerogatives of capitalism while medicalising deviations from these patterns of authority.
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Cohen, B.M.Z. (2016). Youth: Medicalising Deviance. In: Psychiatric Hegemony. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46051-6_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46051-6_5
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