"ADHD vanligt bland unga brottslingar" : En kritisk diskursanalys av hur Aftonbladet och Dagens Nyheter framställer ADHD

Sammanfattning: ADHD is the fastest growing diagnosis of the last decade and there is an ongoing debate about how ADHD should be understood with a psychosocial perspective opposed to a medical perspective. The purpose of this study was to investigate how a Swedish daily and evening newspaper (Aftonbladet and Dagens Nyheter) portrays ADHD. Further, the study asked whether medical or social explanation is used in the discourse that appears in newspaper articles, how ADHD is described as well as which people are quoted in the articles. In this study we used Norman Fairclough´s critical discourse analysis with the 26 sampled articles which we believe highlight different perspectives on ADHD diagnosis. Our study shows that there are representatives cited in the articles from school, the judiciary and the medical field. However representatives from social work are conspicuous by their absence. We have found that there are clearly defined areas in which ADHD is written about. The largest group of stories consists of school, then crime rates, the increase in ADHD and finally a category we call life stories. Our analysis examines the discourse types used within the media discourse with regard to ADHD. We have established that medical discourse dominates when it comes to explaining ADHD. We have found some resistance against what is sometimes called psychosocial discourse and a drug sceptical discourse as evidenced by articles critical of over-medication and malpractice. Our analysis shows that ADHD diagnosis is represented as something unproblematic, with an undifferentiated view of diagnosis, whereby ADHD is reproduced as a taken-for-granted problem which is rarely questioned.