Galia Plotkin - Amrami

We examine diagnostic expansion of ADHD in Israel, based on interviews with mothers who came to identify with the ADHD label after their children were diagnosed. Applying a feminist psychiatric disability perspective, we show that diagnoses reverberate in families and raise unexpected stakes, meanings, and possibilities for mothers. In particular, women’s social role as mothers is central to a sense of “failure” that they associate with ADHD, as well as a main site of self-cultivation, experimentation, and change. Diagnostic expansion is thus an open-ended and relational process, implicating multiple dimensions of self over the life course.