O processo de produção e de enfrentamento do TDAH na escola

Abstract

We have observed an increasing in the demands sent to the public and private health systems, the so-called school complaints, with ADHD - Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder - one of its main representatives. The growing escalation in diagnoses attributed to children of school age who have difficulties in the schooling process and / or in the behavior in the classroom draws our attention, since, along with the diagnosis, there is a great increase in the consumption of psychostimulants, because it is the main conduct chosen for the treatment of those individuals marked under the veil of ADHD. In this context, we identified the phenomenon of the medicalization of education, in which school complaints, that is, issues related to difficulties in schooling processes, which are necessarily linked by various elements of social, political and relational order, become seen and named only by pathological medical knowledge. In this way, the responsibility for difficulties is attributed exclusively to the individual. In order to understand the processes by which the diagnosis of ADHD is made within the school, we conducted an ethnographic-inspired research in a public school in Uberlândia-MG, in a second-year elementary school classroom, with observation records from the classroom, interview with the conducting teacher, interview with a support teacher and interview with the student’s mother who was newly diagnosed with ADHD. Our discussion was based on three axes of analysis: “ADHD - No Man's Land”; "Medical Knowledge - a sentence" and "Knowledge and Non-Knowledge about the disorder". In the first axis, we discuss the fact that different specialists, each in their own way, without taking into account important premises about child development and the intricate schooling process, direct the spotlight to the supposed disorder. In the second, we problematize the supremacy of medical knowledge over pedagogical in the school context, which also involves the family of the child diagnosed with ADHD. Finally, in the third axis, we highlight the teacher’s knowledge and non-knowledge, who in the teaching process helped not to pathologize the children. We also emphasize the importance of the teacher having knowledge about the concepts like the Zone of Proximal Development and the constitution of higher psychological functions, especially attention. If the school is often the place where the ADHD production process occurs, it can also offer possibilities for the collective confrontation of this phenomenon.